webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

jordan peterson

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thought he was gone via self experiment gone wrong dtr but BTB sez dewormer tho both sides?  idw?

merri ok

godfather of manosphere? --> rogin?

cNP groundswell talk?

SEE ARC CONF

SEE SHILLENBERGER

bak 7 24

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BTB Tate bly -->

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BS STAT?

mma

Right-wing media escalate attacks on young women voters following Democratic election wins across the country

Clay Travis: “They've all gone insane, young women are actually insane in this country”

Written by Jane Lee, Isabella Corrao & Helena Hind

Published 11/07/25

In the wake of Democrats’ sweeping election victories across the country on November 4, right-wing media quickly focused their ire on young women, who voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates.

Figures across right-wing media expressed fear over the demographic, with Newsmax host Carl Higbie labeling “liberal white women” as “the biggest threat to America — they will literally vote for their own destruction and take everyone down with them.” The response from right-wing media to women exercising their right to vote ramps up a trend of conservative voices attacking liberal women in the past year.

Right-wing media react to young women voters following November 4 elections

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bb 5 25

For some reason, mass debate videos have become popular lately — and I don't just mean the ones you can find on certain shady websites. Naturally, pseudo-intellectual sniveler and walking clown suit mannequin Jordan Peterson has been quick to hop onto the trend, squaring off against twenty educated young people to debate his hot takes on religion in a matchup billed as "1 Christian Vs. 20 Atheists." (That'll be important later.)

Peterson acts like his usual duplicitous self — one of his opponents describes his technique best as a "semantic smokescreen." Anytime he's on the back foot, which is often, he'll either deny even the most basic assertions of the other person outright or constantly ask for clarification. At one point, he even denies being a Christian, despite that literally being the title of the video — and rather than call out his hypocrisy, the channel opted to simply change the video's name to make him look better.

While this makes excellent ASMR if you like listening to Peterson struggle to defend even his most fundamental points when pressed on them, it also showcases how utterly his rhetoric fails when leveled against those who aren't already inclined to agree with him. Nobody seems to know what Jordan really believes, least of all himself.

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YT 10 25 -->

Peter Thiel’s Race Science Network Extends Its Reach Into Reform UK, Conservatives and Labour – Byline Times

trump-supporting Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is set to extend his financial reach into the UK, after Keir Starmer and the US President announced a new transatlantic tech partnership incorporating his data mining company Palantir. As part of the deal Thiel’s company will invest a further £1.5 billion into Britain, on top of its already extensive interests in the NHS.

However, a Byline Times investigation can reveal that Thiel’s far deeper impact on the country could be an ideological one, focused on a network seeking to rehabilitate discredited race science and authoritarian ideas into the Conservatives, Reform UK and Labour.

At the centre of the network is his friend, admirer, and leading figure in the “neo-reactionary” movement, Curtis Yarvin, the blogger known as Mencius Moldbug.

Thiel’s venture firm has already invested in Yarvin’s company Tlon, and his main political protégé JD Vance — now US vice president — is also a big admirer. What began on fringe blogs is increasingly embedded in Washington, and is now being exported to Britain.

The ‘Dark Enlightenment’

Yarvin is not well yet known among the UK public but his “Dark Enlightenment” writings have been deeply influential on the US right and increasingly in the UK right too. These ideas include calls for the end of democracy, with Yarvin arguing that Western democracies should be replaced by what he has referred to as a “monarchy” run by an unelected dictator, or “CEO”.

They have also included the endorsement of discredited ideas about the “natural inferiority” of black people.

In a 2009 essay Yarvin argued that “the obvious statistical differences in the average talents of human races” justified eliminating the system of representative government.

“Obviously, once you stop believing in democracy, it is easy to stop seeing the failure of this political design in societies with a high percentage of non-Eurasian genetic ancestry as a moral reflection on persons of non-Eurasian ancestry, and start seeing it as a mere engineering failure…” he wrote.

Yarvin is also known for his repeated use of the n-word. In an interview with Byline Times, his associate and founder of the ‘Blue Labour’ movement, Maurice Glasman, confirmed that Yarvin had shown the racial slur to him during a London portrait sitting. Glasman said that he had reacted with disgust but admitted he remained interested in Yarvin’s views on artificial intelligence.

EXCLUSIVE

Silicon Valley Whistleblowers Warn Elon Musk ‘Hijacking’ Republicans to Control Entire US Government

Former followers of the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ say a planned ‘neo-reactionary’ hollowing out of government is happening in real time

Nafeez Ahmed

In February 2025, Yarvin appeared at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) summit in London, co-founded by Jordan Peterson and funded by GB News investor Paul Marshall. Its advisory board includes Peterson, commentator Douglas Murray, Lord Glasman, and Reform UK policy chief James Orr. Both Peterson and Murray have defended The Bell Curve, which claimed racial hierarchies in intelligence. The event was addressed by other leading figures on the right of British politics, including Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.

Yarvin is also scheduled to appear at this year’s How the Light Gets In festival in London, where he will take part in three panels, including one in which Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell says he will interview him for a “lively discussion” as the “philosopher behind JD Vance”.

The upcoming Byline Times investigation will show how Thiel’s ideological network cuts across Britain’s political spectrum:

Together, these strands form a cross-party pincer movement: Thiel’s hard power through Palantir’s contracts, and his soft power through the normalisation of discredited pseudo-scientific neo-reactionary ideas.

As figures like Yarvin move alongside establishment names, Thiel’s network is shifting ideas once confined to the far-right fringe into the centre of mainstream debate.

*Byline Times will publish its full exclusive investigation into Thiel’s new transatlantic network and the Big Tech’s British Takeover, in the coming days.

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BULWARK 9 25

Yet ANOTHER Right-Wing Payola Media Scandal!
This time, the allegations involve paying influencers to post positively about India, a country increasingly in MAGA’s crosshairs.

Will Sommer

Sep 08, 2025

*Welcome back to False Flag! A few years ago, heterodox conservative professor Jordan Peterson vowed to launch Peterson Academy, an online, accredited college that would offer “a high-level, university-quality equivalent” degree for just $2,000.

*Last week, a YouTube investigation into the Peterson Academy waspublished. It revealed price increases, nonexistent exams, and disappointed students starting to suspect that they had paid the annual $399 fee just to watch a couple videotaped lectures.

*With Peterson’s daughter now in charge of the “school” and Peterson himself taking a break from public life, I think traditional academia can rest safely—well, however safe they can feel in the Trump 2.0 era.

*This week, we’re taking a look at the machinations inside a different institution than academia—this one more right-leaning. We’re looking at the MAGA movement’s X power users and whether they’re for sale. Also on tap: Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and the Stalinesque disappearance of its once highly visible CEO. Let’s go.

C’mon. Not Again!

RIGHT-WING MEDIA HAS BEEN ROCKED—yet again—by allegations of a payola scheme on X.

This time, the posts alleged to have been part of a pay-for-play operation were meant to improve how Trump supporters view India. They came as Donald Trump and his supporters started to take an increasingly hostile turn towards the country.

The scandal broke into public view last week when a popular, anonymous right-wing account called “Aesthetica” noted that a number of right-wing influencers—including pundit Chuck Callesto and right-wing meme account “Defiant L’s”—had posted suspiciously similar messages on X defending India and warning that MAGA criticism of the country would only push it closer to China.

“India isn’t the problem,” read one from the account @iAnonPatriot. “Pushing them toward China’s alliance is!”

The “Aesthetica” post highlighting these tweets raised suspicions that the MAGA influencers posting them were on the take. That’s because, while India is traditionally viewed as an American ally, the country has lately become incredibly unpopular among the very online right. In fact, anti-Indian racism has been surging on X, fueled by anger over the belief that H-1B tech visas are fueling unemployment for Americans, as well as Trump’s increasingly hostile tone toward the country over its government’s refusal to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

While the “Aesthetica” post merely raised the prospect of the screenshotted accounts being part of a “paid propaganda” campaign, it didn’t actually deliver the literal receipts. Yet at least one of the influencers called out ended up apologizing, albeit in vague terms.

“The L is on me this time,” said the anonymous operator of “Defiant L’s,” a meme account that scours X for liberals they feel should admit defeat, adding that they had made “an honest mistake.”

Others, however, denied wrongdoing. Rogan O’Handley, an influencer who uses the handle “DC_Draino” and regularly visits the Trump White House, said he was eager for Trump to deal harshly with India.

“I fully support Trump bringing the hammer down on India,” O’Handley wrote in a follow-up post on X. “For the record, I have never and would never take a dime from the Indian government or anyone connected to them or any other government.”

Curiously, others who were accused of participating in the payola scheme phrased their denials very specifically. Similarly to DC_Draino, David Freeman, the operator of the popular MAGA meme account “Gunther Eagleman,” wrote that he “never took a penny from India or any other foreign entity.” That leaves open the possibility that a third-party entity working on an issue related to India may have been involved.

When I asked Freeman via DM whether I could send him questions about the controversy, he replied: “hit me up with any questions.” When I asked him who was involved in the alleged pay-for campaign and whether he was paid, though, he never responded. Days later, I’m now asking: Gunther, where are you?

Join

This isn’t the first time MAGA accounts have found themselves in a payola scandal. Back in March, several popular pro-Trump X users were involved in a scheme to oppose Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s effort to stop people from using food stamps to buy soda and other junk food.

Influenceable, the social media startup allegedly involved in the soda campaign, didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether it organized the pro-India posts. But Aesthetica claimed to have the goods on who did: Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier.

Fournier, who is an avid social media poster, didn’t respond to my requests for comment. And there’s no clear proof that he’s behind the posts—or, if he was, who he was working for.

However, he has recently gone public about his desire to see improved India relations.

“India has always had President Trump’s back,” he wrote in one post.

And there is also some anecdotal evidence to suggest Fournier is not above trying to pay people to post a certain way. QAnon account “MJTruthUltra” recently posted a direct-message exchange that purported to show Fournier offering him $250 to participate in another social media campaign.

How widespread the recent slate of pro-India posting has been is difficult to comprehensively know. But several of the posters did use language similar to an August 26 post on the Gateway Pundit by far-right personality Elijah Schaffer, which ran right around when the first posts on X began. Entitled “Exposed: The Shocking Truth About Who’s Really Cashing In on Russian Oil!,” the piece positions Schaffer as, somehow, an expert on Indian oil economics:

Russia’s share of India’s oil imports rose dramatically—from under 2% in 2021 to about 33% in 2024. But Gross Refining Margins (GRMs) for Indian refiners between FY22 and FY25 actually fell. By FY25, GRMs were lower than when the conflict began—hardly proof of windfall profits.

Do I believe that Schaffer—best known outside of the right for getting ousted from the Blaze after allegedly sexually assaulting a coworker—really cares that much about Indian oil refining? Absolutely not!

I’ve written before about the trend of right-wing influencers who suspiciously get very into niche policy issues in ways that are suspiciously beneficial to big businesses, as with Laura Loomer’s sudden embrace of the intricacies of Venezuelan oil sanctions policy. But Schaffer’s is on another level.

For starters, he could certainly use some cash. On August 24, Schaffer claimed that he had been carjacked at gunpoint in the driveway of his Florida home, with the robbers making off with his high-end BMW. Disastrously for the far-right pundit, Schaffer said he hadn’t noticed that his insurance company had canceled his auto insurance a month before, and he later said he was now out $104,000.

Gateway Pundit owner Jim Hoft didn’t respond to my questions about whether Schaffer’s blog post about the Indian oil industry was a paid promotion.

The Daily Wire’s CEO mystery deepens*

Remember Jeremy Boreing? For years, the Daily Wire’s trash-talking CEO was almost as big of a presence for the conservative media outlet as his cofounder, pundit Ben Shapiro.

Boreing, the company’s self-proclaimed “god king,” enjoyed a reputation as a sort of budding Rupert Murdoch of the Trumpian digital age. He even launched his VID]

own brand of razors after Harry’s Razors dropped its ads at the outlet.

But then, in March of this year, Boreing was abruptly demoted and essentially vanished from public view. Even as Boreing’s rivals on the right went wild with speculation about what went wrong, the Daily Wire insisted that all was well, and Boreing merely stepped down “to focus on creative projects for the company.” (Several of those projects, like a children’s show about a family of chinchillas, were soon obliterated through layoffs.)

As if to signal that Boreing was still in good standing with the company he once ran, the Daily Wire also said Boreing would continue to host Daily WireBackstage, a macho video series where Boreing moderated a panel of Daily Wire stars—Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan—as they talked politics, smoked stogies, and munched onbig bowls of candy.

Mysteriously, Backstagenever aired another episode after Boreing’s ouster. But late last month, the Daily Wire announced that it was effectively bringing back Backstageunder a new name, Friendly Fire*. The cast is the same, except now Boreing has vanished.

The ad promoting the new show appears to take some jabs at Boreing’s old position asBackstage’s moderator, declaring the show will have “no safe words, no moderator!” At one point in the ad, Walsh jokes that, perhaps, “we do need a moderator.”

The references to the Daily Wire’s vanished CEO don’t end there. In a promotional spot for Friendly Fire, Walsh said that the Daily Wire would mark its tenth anniversary “not by looking back, but by launching what’s next.”

The Friendly Fireannouncement comes amid another Daily Wire campaign to get an immediate payout from its biggest fans. Late last month, the company debuted a $1,500 “lifetime membership” that offers “unlimited access” to its premium content—which works out to roughly six years of all-access Daily Wire subscriptions at the normal price.

That premium content will apparently include access to Boreing’s passion project: a long-delayed streaming TV show called the Pendragon Cycle—a fantasy adaptation of the King Arthur story.

I say that because the lifetime membership page contains a single image teasing a new show, now dubbed Rise of The Merlin: The Pendragon Cycle. As I wrote earlier this year, production videos of the show’s Game of Thrones–style medieval battles made the show look comically expensive, so I’m sure the Daily Wire wants to sell those lifetime memberships as quickly as possible.

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Manosphere influencers and Rumble streamers respond to Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy by claiming it's a coup and the 2024 election will be rigged

08/02/24

manosphere influencers and Rumble streamers are laying the groundwork to challenge the legitimacy of the 2024 election by pushing election misinformation around Vice President Kamala Harris.

On their podcasts and social media feeds, these streamers and influencers from the so-called “manosphere” have joined right-wing media in attacking the likely Democratic presidential nominee with sexist smears and racist remarks. These influencers have also promoted conspiratorial beliefs, calling her candidacy a “coup” and claiming that the upcoming election will be “rigged” in her favor.

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mma 7 24

google demonetized The Heartland Institute in June. Here are 4 more channels that appear to violate its misinformation policy.

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 07/31/24

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youtube rec to me 1 23 globalist BS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF5spyudTYA

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WALSH KIRK BLAZE?

Right-wing media escalate civil war rhetoric after Supreme Court rules against Texas in razor wire case | Media Matters for America

In response to a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing Border Patrol agents to cut razor wire Texas laid along the border with Mexico, right-wing pundits are claiming the Biden administration has sparked a second American Civil War. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, two members of the court’s conservative block, sided with the three liberal justices in ruling for the federal government.

The issue stems from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to stretch razor wire over dozens of miles along the state’s southern border, a cruel policy that has failed in its stated objective of deterring unauthorized border crossings. The Biden administration opposes the measures, and has ordered the Border Patrol to remove the barriers. The stand-off between Border Patrol and the Texas National Guard escalated earlier this month, with federal officials blaming Abbott for the deaths of a mother and her two children who drowned in the Rio Grande. (Texas authorities dispute this version of events.)

For his part, Gov. Abbott pledged that Texas will “continue to deploy this razor wire to repel illegal immigration.” Although it may appear that Abbott is in direct defiance of the Supreme Court, the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explained that the ruling overturned an “order saying Border Patrol COULDN’T remove Texas razor wire to process migrants. It didn’t affirmatively rule that the Border Patrol COULD remove Texas razor wire.” Or, as the New Republic's Matt Ford put it, the Supreme Court “lifted an injunction” on the Department of Homeland Security, so there's “nothing in this case for Texas to obey or defy at the moment.”

This simmering confrontation is the new backdrop for an old story. During election years, conservative media outlets generally ramp up their attacks on immigrants. Separately, over the last year, conservatives have become increasingly comfortable calling for, threatening, or warning about a coming civil war in the country. Responses to the recent court ruling have married these two trends.

As the news broke on January 22, conservative YouTube streamer Tim Pool said it “looks like a Fort Sumter-esque type scenario,” referencing the first battle of the Civil War, adding that “it does feel like it could be escalating to this federal versus state conflict.”

That evening, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson posted on X (formerly Twitter), asking: “Where are the men of Texas? Why aren’t they protecting their state and the nation?”

The same night, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) wrote that “the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.”

Then on January 23, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon appeared to favorably reference that post, saying “as Clay Higgins said” there is “kind of a civil war between the federal government and the state of Texas.”

Hours later, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk fantasized about Gov. Abbott openly defying the court’s ruling at the barrel of a gun.

Video CitationFrom the January 23, 2024, edition of Salem Media Group's The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

“So someone says right here, ‘Charlie, what would happen if Texas ignores the ruling? Will the government go to war with Texas?’” he asked.

“The federal government would come in, and some people would say, ‘Well, that's the seeds of a civil war.’ Is that what you want? Where does this end?” Kirk added moments later. “By the way, I'm all on board.”

“If we had an actual governor of Texas that was willing — 100% defy this,” Kirk continued, before advising Abbott on the logistics.

“If you're going to defy, here's how it works: press conference flanked by your most loyal Texas Rangers. ‘I am ignoring the Supreme Court's decision,’” Kirk said, adopting Abbott’s point of view. “‘I will enforce the border of Texas. If you're going to arrest me, you have to go through the Texas Rangers.’”

“If we had more governors on the border, it would be even more powerful,” he added, implicitly invoking the Confederacy. “Get every red state on board. Fly in every Republican governor.”

On Wednesday afternoon Abbott issued a statement invoking “Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” which he claimed is “the supreme law of the land.” Throughout the day, at least nine governors backed Abbott on X, even if they fell short of Kirk’s demand that they travel to the border. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp all posted their support for Texas, as did Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

In the same episode, Kirk told his audience that they had “better buy weapons,” and “have a lot of guns at your disposal.”

That afternoon, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh echoed Kirk. “Red state governors will need to ignore the Supreme Court and do what needs to be done to protect their citizens and the border,” Walsh said. He later added, “The last civil war was unimaginable until it wasn't.”

In the early evening, Bannon returned to the topic with guest Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). “That Supreme Court decision that was made has now put the federal government at war with the state of Texas,” Greene said.

“If they fund a war in Ukraine when Zelensky is raising the white flag, asking for peace talks in Switzerland, and they weaken our border policy while the federal government is at war with Texas, that is truly, possibly the start of a civil war in this country,” she added.

Blaze TV’s Steve Deace also invoked the memory of the Civil War. “Basically, the Supreme Court has told Texas your choices are: be invaded or secede,” Deace said.

Video

CitationFrom the January 23, 2024, edition of BlazeTV's The Steve Deace Show

On January 25, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade adopted the same framing on Fox & Friends.

Video

CitationFrom the January 25, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

“It feels like almost like a soft civil war,” Kilmeade said. “You’ve got all the Republicans saying, ‘Can we secure our borders?’ the Democrats saying, ‘I want this to go away’ and blaming Republicans, the President against the governor of Texas — the most independent state in the union. I mean, this is getting a little crazy.”

Fox News sounded little different than the fringe. “This is a constitutional crisis,” said conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in a video titled: “Supreme Court Decision Provokes Civil War in Texas.”

The story was the same in the right-wing blogosphere, too, with conservative news site PJ Media asking, “Is Joe Biden Mounting a Civil War at the Border?”

Conservative influencer Jordan Peterson posted: “So is it the case that@TheDemocrats are truly ready to go to war with Texas?”

While right-wing media figures fantasize about a new civil war, their rhetoric has real implications for immigration policy. They are stoking xenophobia and nativism, and endorsing cruel policies that are already injuring and killing some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

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agenda 21 reboot // gt reset morano fuckery wingnuttery

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-use-misinformation-around-15-minute-cities-pivot-toward-climate

mma 4 23

Misinformation surrounding a plan to reduce traffic in the city of Oxford, England, is the latest example of how three years after the onset of COVID-19, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have seamlessly transitioned into climate change denial, and how this message is proliferating not just in Europe, but now in the U.S. as well.

The Oxford plan, which aims to cut down on daytime traffic and greenhouse gas emissions from cars, has been conflated with a broader “15-minute city” urban planning concept, which calls for communities where necessities are within walking/biking distance. The plan recently made headlines when right-wing media influencers presented it as one component of the sprawling “Great Reset” conspiracy theory, saying its goal is to lock down residents and essentially turn cities into open-air prisons. Backlash, led in part by climate change denier Jordan Peterson, was so severe that academics and politicians who support the plan or the related idea of a 15-minute city got death threats.

What is a 15-minute city?

In a nutshell, the concept of the 15-minute city is that life’s necessities such as schools and grocery stores should be just a short walk or bike ride away. According to Carlos Moreno, an urban planning professor who helped lay out the plan in Paris, cities should be “designed so that we can live, work and thrive in them without having to constantly commute elsewhere.” The goal is to foster healthier habits and stronger social relationships between neighbors by prioritizing green space, accessibility, and safety for human bodies, bikes, and public transportation, rather than cars.

The City of Oxford is implementing a separate strategy, Local Plan 2040, to help achieve these goals. But that’s not what has drawn so much attention in the media.

The traffic plan approved by the Oxford County Council which triggered backlash is meant to reduce commuting time and greenhouse gas emissions from excess traffic. According to a fact check from the Associated Press: “Oxfordshire has approved a plan to put ‘traffic filters’ on some main roads, restricting drivers’ access during daytime hours and freeing up space for buses, cyclists and pedestrians. But car owners can apply for daylong permits to bypass the new rules, and many other vehicles are exempt. All parts of the county will remain accessible by car, officials said.”

Right-wing opposition to the 15-minute city has been firmly rooted in COVID conspiracy theories

Despite what is actually happening in Oxford, right-wing influencers have painted the plan as a thin veneer for controlling every aspect of residents’ movement with the goal of preventing them from owning cars or leaving town at all. According to DeSmog, in 2022 in England, COVID-19 conspiracy theorist David Fleming, along with figures tied to climate denial think tank Global Warming Policy Foundation, created a group to oppose the plan and spread false claims via leaflets to Oxford residents. One founding signatory was Del Bigtree, a U.S. filmmaker and founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, an anti-vaccine group.

The seeds for the conspiracy theory to take root in the U.S. were planted back in April 2020. Frequent Fox News guest and climate change denierSteve Milloy warned of an impending “climate lockdown”and the idea proliferated, with figures like Laura Ingraham and Alex Jones claiming in 2021 that COVID-19 lockdowns were conditioning the public for even more stringent mandates in the name of climate change.

15-minute city fearmongering comes to the US

The ideas driving the 15-minute city are not new. New urbanism and public transit enthusiasts have been gaining traction on social media as Gen Zers and millennials lament their childhood confinement to suburbs that felt unnavigable and isolating. For years, but especially post-pandemic, cities across the globe have prioritized walkability and mixed-use development.

Right-wing media are working hard to maintain the status quo in part through elaborate conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities or anything seemingly related. Right-wing media figures including Australian anti-lockdown campaigner Bernie Spofforth, Turning Point USA contributor Drew Hernandez, and Swedish climate change denier Peter Imanuelsen have insisted they are being spearheaded by The World Economic Forum. In truth, the WEF has mixed things to say about the concept. 

Right-wing culture warrior James Lindsay, said in a March 7 segment on One America News’ Morning News with Stephanie Myers that 15-minute cities are a means of “more social control.” He went on to say that they would lead to “new kinds of car non-ownership subscription borrowed models, kind of like Uber, but with no owner. All these things going, so that you don't have freedom of movement” before falsely claiming that in Oxford, “you can only leave your zone so many days a year” and “absolutely no vehicle that emits any kind of ah, you know, I guess CO2 or whatever was allowed to drive during certain hours.”

In the same segment, host Stephanie Myers again suggested that residents of 15-minute cities would be allocated 100 passes per year permitting them to leave their designated zones. In reality, Oxford drivers will always be able to get wherever they want using alternate routes, as only some roads will have traffic filters. Both Myers and Lindsay are misleadingly referencing the fact that local residents will have to apply for 100 day-long permits per year, where they can use any road at any time of the day free of charge.

On an April 6 segment of OAN’s Tipping Point with Kara McKinney, Jeffrey Tucker, former editorial director for the Koch-funded Foundation for Economic Education, blamed Dr. Anthony Fauci for 15-minute cities. Tucker said Fauci, who served as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and was a lead member of the White House COVID-19 Task Force under Trump, wanted people “imprisoned in our local communities and condemned to forage and eat bugs” and that he and the ruling oligarchy would insist on “no football games, no concerts, no amusement parks, certainly no church. They want us doomed to a kind of a pre-medieval existence with them in charge.”

In the interview, Tucker also used the familiar trope of Democrats supposedly being soft on crime, but he claimed it was intentional. “They really want to dismantle our cities. There’s no better way to do that than through crime,” he said. And the fact that cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco are “collapsing in a miasma of blood and weed” would supposedly give them an excuse, he said.

Climate change denier Marc Moranospoke about 15-minute cities on an April 10 segment of OAN’s In Focus. Morano told OAN contributor Alison Steinberg that 15-minute cities are “conjuring up a little place called … East Germany, where you literally had to apply to the government in order to go from place to place. … All of this again is so that we will stay at home. That's actually the goal. They loved COVID lockdowns.” Steinberg asked of “radical leftists”: “Do you think they really realize — hey, you're not going to be able to drive to go get your little soy crackers that you like eating every night while you’re watching and playing your video games?”

In an April 11 segment of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle,Laura Ingraham spoke with U.K. professor Norman Fenton, who claimed 15-minute cities are “absolutely catastrophic” and that “the idea is essentially to stop you — yeah, it’s to stop you going out of the zone, stop you traveling wherever you want. … But in practice, people will have to go out of the zone to get to work, to take their kids to school and stuff like that.”

Fenton is a memberof HART (Health Advisory and Recovery Team), described by The Daily Dot as “a group of prominent proponents of an anti-vaccination, anti-lockdown, anti-mask strategy.” He has inaccurately suggested that the spike in second-wave COVID-19 deaths in 2021 may have been caused by vaccines.

Before turning his attention to 15-minute cities, Fenton also railed against the UK government's net-zero emissions target, misleadingly conflating it with a report on absolute zero emissions, which is not a current policy goal. He suggests that the government might prohibit airplane travel and shipping in the U.K. by 2050. This is not happening.

Online, one American anti-vaccine group seems particularly concerned about Oxford. Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vax group, promoted a video of a young girl making a speech at a protest in Oxford calling 15-minute cities a “dystopian reality” on Telegram and on Twitter. One article on the group’s news site gives credence to the idea that 15-minute cities could in fact lead to “climate lockdowns.” The group also promoted a February protest against 15-minute cities in Oxford. Kennedy recently announced his bid for the presidency.

Infowars promoted a video that compares a hen house to a 15-minute city because “it’s a spot-on illustration of how they view the people as vassals, or serfs – who only exist to produce eggs to be harvested.” The Telegram channel for the anti-vax group The Truth About Cancer wrote that 15-minute cities are proof that “we are under attack” from the “globalist ghouls.”

For online conspiracy theory networks, anti-15-minute city propaganda has been a gateway to climate change denial

On social media, an infamous COVID-19 conspiracy theory network has also signaled a shift to climate change denial, with the 15-minute city as a catalyst.

A channel that has been promoted by White Rose, an international disinformation group that operates on a network of Telegram channels, is among those promoting conspiracy theories about the 15-minute city, in addition to climate change denial.

The channel, Wide Awake Media, has 26k subscribers on its Telegram channel and has recently been gaining traction on Twitter. It has occasionally featured posts about climate change but started posting more often on the topic in January 2023 when the topic of 15-minute cities was becoming popular in right-wing media. This topic has provokedviolent responses suggesting that leaders who support green policies should be killed.

On March 31, Wide Awake noted on both Twitter and Telegram that it had turned its attention to climate change, calling it a scam and comparing it to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[twit]

members of White Rose, which made headlines for distributing anti-vax stickers, posters, and leaflets, have also discussed the group’s shift to 15-minute cities. The group has repeatedly promoted Wide Awake, which primarily sells merchandise promoting conspiracy theories, in its channel.

The continued popularity of 15-minute city conspiracy theories proves that climate change denial is the perfect place for anti-vax and anti-mask enthusiasm to thrive as COVID-19 becomes less prominent in the news cycle but their need to prove they are “wide awake” persists. We have also seen that it can be easily adapted for U.S. audiences with their specific villains, such as Fauci, and framed as an affront to American values, such as our obsession with cars.

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Edgelords at risk of falling off: Daily Wire hosts confirm YouTube strikes, suspensions

After stripping advertiser revenue from Matt Walsh’s YouTube channel, the platform suspended Candace Owens and Michael Knowles for violating the terms of service

Special PROGRAMS

LGBTQ

WRITTEN BY ARI DRENNEN

PUBLISHED 06/15/23

In what is becoming a regular series of disclosures, Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing took to Twitter Sunday night to report that podcast hosts Candace Owens and Michael Knowles had both been suspended for receiving second strikes against their accounts on Friday and that Jordan Peterson had been given his first. Three strikes against a YouTube account in a 90-day period leads to its termination. 

Matt Walsh’s YouTube account was stripped of advertiser revenue in April for hateful conduct against trans Bud Light model Dylan Mulvaney. Walsh said in a speech denouncing Media Matters that the move had cost him more than $100,000 per month, and he complained that “it doesn’t seem that other channels are being held to this standard right now.”

That seems to be changing: Boreing alleged that “in the last 90 days, our accounts have received 104 violations for ‘Hateful and Derogatory’ content, earning them ‘limited monetization,’” He added that “nearly every one of these violations comes from our coverage of the trans debate.”

The Daily Wire once again credited Media Matters for YouTube’s decision to enforce its existing terms of service, with vice president of public relations Alyssa Cordova sharing an article from March that enumerated the anti-trans hate published across Daily Wire YouTube channels.

In a Twitter thread posted Wednesday, Knowles claimed that he had received a weeklong suspension from YouTube for violations including implying that trans people are “mentally inferior” and referring to Mulvaney using he/him pronouns.

Recent weeks of Candace Owens have featured the personality urging viewers to avoid shopping at Target “or else you’re gay and you’re a pervert,” claiming that “transgenderism” is “a cancer and we should fight it,” and bragging that she could “beat up” a nonbinary Navy service member.

Knowles has argued that banning books and drag queens is “very American,” called to ban the Pride flag and other LGBTQ symbols, and breathlessly warned viewers that “hypnosis pornography” might turn them trans. This dark and dehumanizing rhetoric fits with a larger vision of state violence against marginalized communities.

In his thread about the suspensions, Boreing called out investment firms Blackrock and Vanguard,joining  a larger conservative effort to cancel companies with pro-LGBTQ policies.Peterson called the two companies “sworn enemies” and promised retribution that would make Target and Bud Light “sideshows by comparison.”

Despite the action on YouTube, the DailyWire+ app remains available on the Google Play Store, which says that it disallows “apps that promote violence, or incite hatred against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, caste, immigration status, or any other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.”

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The DailyWire+ app is also available on the Apple App Store, which claims to ban “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary” about sexual orientation and gender, particularly if the app or content “is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group.” Apple removed Infowars, the podcast hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, from the platform in September of 2018, spurring other tech companies to do the same, and severely limiting the reach of Jones’ harmful rhetoric.

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jordan p more ppl die solar; left wing set forest fires; spotify ceo slippery slope

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https://www.eenews.net/articles/climate-misinformation-spreads-on-musks-twitter/

scott waldman e and e 12 22 no lnx

scientists say they’re experiencing more climate denial on Twitter since Elon Musk became owner of the social media platform.]

At Tesla, Elon Musk helped kick-start an electric vehicle revolution that will meaningfully cut greenhouse gas emissions. Now, as Twitter’s CEO, he’s overseeing one of the world’s most popular social media platforms that’s rife with climate change misinformation.

And it appears to be getting worse.

Since Musk’s purchase of Twitter two months ago, some prominent climate deniers have returned to the platform after being banned for pushing misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. There also are signs that scientists have left Twitter after their posts depicting global warming research were swarmed by critics.

Among the changes potentially driven by Musk’s effort to tear down barriers that once prohibited figures like former President Donald Trump from spreading election lies are a rise in the popularity of tweets that claim climate change is a scam. Some recent posts have earned 40,000 likes.

Marc Morano, who runs a blog that routinely attacks climate science, said that since Musk bought Twitter the appearance of his name in climate search results “appear to be juiced by the new algorithms.”

“My Twitter account and many others opposing the ‘consensus’ climate view have all increased visibility dramatically since Musk took over Twitter,” he said in an interview. “Whatever Musk is altering, I hope he keeps it up.”

Indeed, the number of tweets rejecting climate science have never been higher than in 2022, according to research by the University of London conducted on behalf of The Times newspaper. There have been more than 850,000 climate denial tweets or retweets so far this year. There were 650,000 such messages in 2021 and 220,000 in 2020, the analysis found.

Musk has said he will sell the blue check marks that Twitter uses to verify account holders to anyone who pays $8 a month. Users who pay the fee will see their posts “rocket to the top of replies, mentions and search,” according to Twitter. That could also mean that scientists who refuse to pay the monthly fee could see their posts lose visibility.

Climate misinformation has long been present on Twitter. But the proposed blue check mark policy could make the social media platform a larger clearinghouse for climate denialism, experts say.

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Tweets that misinform the public about climate change can increase interactions on Twitter by generating controversy, said Michelle Amazeen, director of the Communication Research Center at Boston University and an expert on climate disinformation and social media.

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“Twitter wasn’t designed to provide accurate info. Twitter is designed to maximize people’s attention and engagement. And how do you do that? You surface sensational, emotionally evocative content rather than surface deliberative rational information,” she said. “That’s not sexy, it’s all about the architecture.”

Earlier this week, a search for “climate” on Twitter resulted in “#ClimateScam” as the top term on the platform. Tweets using that hashtag were a miasma of climate disinformation, cherry-picked statistics and conspiracy theories. On another day, the top result was “climate lockdown,” a reference to the Great Reset conspiracy theory that claims a group of global elites is planning to shut down economic activity around the world to cut carbon emissions (Climatewire, Dec. 6).

Twitter appears to now boost the accounts of serial climate misinformers, including Steve Milloy, a former Trump EPA transition official; Patrick Moore, former head of the CO2 Coalition; and Morano, who runs a climate denial blog. In recent Twitter searches, their accounts appeared in top results with climate scientists, media outlets and NOAA.

Milloy and Moore did not respond to requests for comment.

Some prominent Twitter users who convey climate misinformation and were banned from the platform for other reasons have returned under Musk’s ownership. Tony Heller, who was removed for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, has recently tweeted inaccuracies about global warming. More prominently, the Canadian author Jordan Peterson, who was removed for tweeting transphobic messages, was allowed back on Twitter under Musk and now frequently pushes climate disinformation to his 3.5 million followers. He recently retweeted Heller using the term #climatescam.

“Delusional green policies kill. Literally. Now,” Peterson wrote recently.

‘Radically different’

Prominent climate scientists say they are experiencing an increase of “climate denier bots”— which they identify as having a Twitter handle followed by a name and a bunch of numbers — that respond to their posts. It seems to be an effort to disrupt online climate discourse, said climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Twitter was a primary medium for dissemination of the facts surrounding the climate crisis,” Mann said in an email. “By infecting the online discourse w/ massive troll and bot armies, it becomes very difficult to communicate these facts, which is precisely what polluters and petro-state bad actors like Russia and Saudi Arabia want.”

Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, also experienced a swarm of bots in recent weeks. She has been testing tweets and running experiments to check engagement and found a dramatic increase in troll and bot activity on climate tweets, she said. A few days ago, she received 3,000 replies from critics — or trolls — in one 24-hour period.

“I’m not totally sure what is happening, but there is something radically different going on the last month that has increased troll and bot activity on climate tweets by 15-30x according to my data,” Hayhoe tweeted recently.

She also created a master list of hundreds of climate scientists on Twitter. Its membership has shrunk by about 4 percent since the Musk takeover, she noted.

Even though Musk runs a company that has created the exact type of clean energy jobs that Biden wants to increase under the Inflation Reduction Act, he has elevated voices that routinely attack renewable energy and climate science. Some also attack the electric vehicle tax credits and grants that have been a key to Tesla’s growth.

In recent weeks, Musk’s team has provided internal company communications, or “Twitter Files,” to a select group of opinion writers. The communications show that Twitter officials discussed how to handle tweets related to Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election. One of the writers who received the documents was Michael Shellenberger, who has promoted increased fossil fuel consumption and attacked clean energy and climate science in congressional hearings as a Republican-invited witness.

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In a recent hearing, Shellenberger said an expansion of electric vehicles “risks undermining American industries and helping China.”

‘Climate is a scam’

A few weeks after Musk bought Twitter on Oct. 27 for $44 billion, the company eliminated a policy that cracked down on Covid-19 misinformation. Some scientists, including Mann, said the policy also limited inaccurate climate narratives.

“That was a clear message that it’s open season on twitter for the promotion of anti-science, and clearly we’ve seen an escalation in climate denial rhetoric,” Mann said of the policy’s withdrawal.

Scientists concluded decades ago that humans are warming the planet at an unprecedented pace through the burning of fossil fuels. A movement to dilute those findings has been funded in part by energy companies and linked to conservative politics in the U.S. and other countries. Twitter is a key platform for spreading that type of false information.

In April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its sixth assessment report and found that effective communication of climate science has been significantly damaged by the spread of false claims on social media.

“Accurate transference of the climate science has been undermined significantly by climate change countermovements, in both legacy and new/social media environments through misinformation,” the report stated.

That same month, Twitter banned paid ads that promote climate denial.

“We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” company officials wrote in a blog post.

It’s unclear if that policy is still in place. Musk has fired more than half of the company’s employees, including its communications department. The two authors of the blog no longer work for the company.

Musk could not be reached for comment.

Since July, months before Musk bought Twitter, there was an uptick in content referring to “#ClimateScam,” “climate scam,” or “climate is a scam,” totaling more than 500,000 mentions, according to a report released last month by Climate Action Against Disinformation, an international coalition of environmental groups. The messages originated from about 150,000 accounts and spiked around the time that global climate talks began in Egypt last month, the report found.

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Researchers found one account, @climate_fact, that was responsible for more than 50,000 tweets. Every few minutes, it retweeted posts that use “#climatescam,” “#greatreset” and other phrases. It’s unclear who runs the account or where they are located.

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The suspect, David Wayne DePape, has been charged with a slew of state and local offenses, including attempted homicide and attempted kidnapping of a family member of an elected official.

DePape allegedly smashed a back window of Pelosi’s San Francisco home early Friday morning, woke up her sleeping husband and demanded to speak with “Nancy.” The Speaker was not at home.

DePape told investigators his plan was to hold “Nancy hostage and talk to her.” He came prepared with flex-cuffs, tape, rope and two hammers, according to police. He said he wanted to interrogate Nancy Pelosi, because she was the “leader of the pack” of the lying Democratic Party, according to the federal criminal complaint.

READ MORE: 'Break her kneecaps': Feds charge suspect who attacked Paul Pelosi as new details on his motivation are revealed

DePape said he planned to let Pelosi go if she told him “the truth,” but that if she “lied,” he was going to break “her kneecaps,” the complaint said. DePape said he was certain that Pelosi would not have told the “truth.” This was an astute inference on his part seeing as the “truth” he was looking for probably had something to do with a cabal of satanist pedophiles. Pelosi’s wounds, DePape stated, would put Congress on notice that there are “consequences for actions.”

That’s the classic logic of terrorism.

DePape’s plan is reminiscent of another plan to kidnap and interrogate Democratic leaders. It’s what the Wolverine Watchmen militia were accused of plotting to do with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. The men schemed and trained to kidnap her and “put her on a show trial” over covid regulations.

DePape’s online footprint shows a man in the tightening grip of radicalization. He registered a domain name in August and began posting feverishly about QAnon, Pizzagate and the pedophile cabal that runs the world. He was an election denier and a proponent of the Big Lie of 2020 voter fraud. He also indulged in Holocaust denial and other forms of antisemitism, anti-Black racism, rants against “groomers” and attacks on Ukrainian democracy. He also found time to defend the honor of rightwing scholar and icon Jordan Peterson.

READ MORE: ['What the hell is wrong with these people?': Conservative batters the GOP response to Pelosi beating

DePape embraced the Revolutionary War kitsch beloved of J6 insurgents. In an interview, he repeatedly likened himself to the American founding fathers. He claimed to be fighting tyranny without the option of surrender.

Some of the most notorious J6 insurgents specifically targeted Pelosi during the J6 siege.

Guy Reffitt said he wanted to drag Nancy Pelosi out of the building. He brought a semi-automatic handgun onto Capitol grounds. "I just want to see Pelosi's head hitting every fucking stair of the building,” Reffitt said. Reffit also brought flex-cuffs.

Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs, who is on trial for seditious conspiracy, said he wanted to see Pelosi’s head “rolling down the front steps” of the Capitol. Meggs and fellow Oath Keeper Kenneth Harrelson are accused of splitting off from the group to go “hunting” for Pelosi.

Insurgent Mark Mazza, who brought two loaded guns, told investigators that if he’d crossed paths with Pelosi "you'd be here for another reason."

Dawn Bancroft admitted on video that she and her friend broke into the Capitol and that they’d been “looking for Nancy to shoot her in the friggin' brain.”

We now know, in the suspect’s own words, that he was specifically targeting Speaker Pelosi for political violence. In the days following the attack, the political right has tried every bad faith deflection tactic imaginable, blaming DePape’s actions on drugs and mental illness. While DePape is likely mentally ill and may suffer from addiction, these factors are secondary at best.[ knowingly wind them up, then throw under bus]

This was a well-organized, premeditated attack.

DePape allegedly assembled a restraint kit, bought hammers, pinpointed his target’s address, and broke into the home under the cover of darkness. He knew exactly what he was doing.

The roots of this attack lie in toxic conspiracy theories that convince unstable people that their freedom is at risk and an insurrection that has gone largely unpunished.

As President Joe Biden said in Delaware, “[i]t’s one thing to condemn the violence but you can’t condemn the violence unless you condemn those people who continue to argue the election was not real, that it’s being stolen.”

READ MORE: 'Too soon?' Don Jr. mocks brutal hammer attack with 'Paul Pelosi Halloween costume' meme

underwear and hammer gay tryst? musk twit consp theory from wacko blog?

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https://boingboing.net/2022/08/22/with-a-little-help-in-the-edit-jordan-peterson-makes-a-lot-of-sense.html

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https://www.desmog.com/:{2022/01:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:/28/jordan-petersons-climate-expert-is-science-denier-funded-by-oil-backed-think-tank/

the source for author Jordan Peterson’s recent claim that climate change cannot be modelled was a climate science denier who received money from a libertarian think tank funded by oil companies. 

The Canadian psychologist was widely criticised for spreading climate misinformation this week after telling the popular Joe Rogan podcast’s 11 million subscribers that climate models were full of errors that increase over time, and that climate is too complicated to model accurately.

Peterson responded to the criticism on Thursday in tweets to his 2.2 million followers citing a book called “Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate” by S Fred Singer.

Singer, an American atmospheric physicist who died in 2020, argued that climate change was natural and not increased by human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. He argued that warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions was “trivial”.

In 1990 he founded the Science and Environment Policy Project (SEPP) that expounded these views. In 2014 DeSmog revealed that Singer received $5,000 a month from US right-wing think tank the Heartland Institute, which has taken donations from oil interests including ExxonMobil and the Koch family. Singer was a speaker at a 2012 Heartland conference where sponsors received $67 million from Exxon, Koch and the Scaife Family Foundations.

Singer frequently criticised climate modelling by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the peer-reviewed authority on climate science made up of hundreds of climate scientists.

In a 2016 article for American Thinker, Singer wrote: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has to provide proof for significant human-caused climate change; yet their climate models have never been validated and are rapidly diverging from actual observations.

“The real threat to humanity comes not from any (trivial) greenhouse warming but from cooling periods creating food shortages and famines."

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"The Scientists Were Right’

Dr Simon Evans, policy editor at Carbon Brief, told DeSmog: “Back in the early 1970s, scientists were building simple climate models and they hypothesised that rising greenhouse gas emissions would warm the planet.

“Well, the results are in, and those scientists were right. Not only that, those models – and other more recent ones – have been pretty accurate in estimating how much warming we would get.”

Peterson is known for his self-help books and opposition to “identity politics”, but has increasingly been spreading climate science misinformation.In his Joe Rogan interview, Peterson advocated hydraulic fracturing to extract shale gas – known as fracking – and dismissed the idea that greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced to net zero by 2050. 

In an appearance on BBC Question Time in November, Peterson criticised the COP26 UN climate summit and said developing countries should not be encouraged to control their CO2 emissions.

Last week Peterson shared a tweet from Net Zero Watch, a rebranding of the climate science-denying Global Warming Policy Forum, which questioned whether wind power is a “reliable, efficient and in-demand technology”. Peterson’s tweet added, regarding net zero targets: “Any “policy maker” who aims at zero anything has instantly demonstrated his or her incompetence.”

Jennie King, head of civic action and education at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank, said: “This latest episode reveals a growing trend, whereby ‘non-climate influencers’ are becoming central nodes of mis- and disinformation for a mainstream public and exposing them to views which either deny the reality and impacts of climate change, or explicitly undermine trust in the science and institutions working to marshal a response.

“There are absolutely things to be debated and agreed around climate action, governance, timelines and finance, but the fundamental bases that Peterson calls into question are entirely ill-informed and do not move the conversation forward,” she added.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/joe-rogan-experience/spotifys-joe-rogan-and-guest-jordan-peterson-suggest-trans-people-are-sign

of civ collapse

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beast

LGBT

Elliot Page’s Abs Have Got Jordan Peterson in a Tizzy Again

OBSESSED

The controversial academic was banned from Twitter for calling the trans actor’s doctor a “criminal physician.” Now, the star’s shirtless pics have professor in a flap.

Adam Manno

Entertainment Reporter

Updated Jul. 09, 2022 1:16PM ET / Published Jul. 09, 2022 12:18PM ET

Photos by Chris Williamson and Peter White/Getty Images

Jordan Peterson won’t stop criticizing Elliot Page’s transition, even after the controversial academic was banned from Twitter for calling the trans actor’s doctor a “criminal physician.”

On the podcast Krystal Kyle and Friends, Peterson explained to Kyle Kulinski why Page remains the focus of his ire.

“See, I would’ve left Ellen Page alone if she hadn't been parading her new abs in a fashion magazine,” he said, continuously misgendering Page by using his dead name and his old pronouns.

“How many kids do you think she convinced to convert? One? A thousand?” Peterson asked.

He was referring to Page’s turn as Esquire’s cover star in June. The Umbrella Academy actor showed off his new physique in several photos, some of them shirtless, and talked about how comfortable he feels working out in his new body.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @elliotpage

For Peterson, it’s all tantamount to “social contagion.”

“She has the responsibility not to entice confused adolescents into a catastrophic decision before they have the maturity to make that decision,” he said.

The University of Toronto psychology professor—who has developed quite a following among the “intellectual” right—was suspended from Twitter after tweeting that Page “had her breasts removed by a criminal physician” on June 22. According to screenshots of his account shared on social media, the platform flagged the post as “hateful conduct” and barred him from posting until he agreed to delete it.

(L-R) Former Juno co-stars Jennifer Garner, Elliot Page, and J.K. Simmons speak onstage during the 94th Annual Academy Awards.

Neilson Barnard

The suspension even drew criticism from Elon Musk, who said the platform has gone “way too far in squashing dissenting opinions.”

Kyle said the tweet got Peterson in “trouble,” but the professor downplayed the importance of his suspension.

“Well, I don’t know if it got me in trouble, you know, I don’t think I’m in trouble, Twitter banned me, but I don’t consider that trouble,” Peterson said.

Kyle argued that trans people are going through the same kind of persecution that gay people did during their fight for acceptance, prompting Peterson to interrupt him.

“You’re utterly wrong,” he said. “There’s nothing about that that’s right.”

He brought up Canada’s 2017 law that added “gender identity or expression” to a section of the criminal code targeting hate speech, defined as inciting hatred and advocating for genocide. The anti-discrimination law “might” make it a crime to “repeatedly, consistently refuses to use a person’s chosen pronoun,” a University of Toronto law professor told the CBC.

Jordan B. Peterson is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, a public speaker, and a creator of Self Authoring.

Romy Arroyo Fernandez

Not one to be silenced, Peterson continued to rage against Page on Kyle’s podcast. Amid a flurry of typical anti-trans attacks, the professor expressed concern that the Canadian law would usher in a state of mass panic and uncertainty.

“For every one person of that sort that we hypothetically save, we doom a thousand more as a consequence of confusion and social contagion,” he said.

“Often, when you introduce social confusion, you can produce a psychogenic epidemic. Generally, it’s adolescent females who are more susceptible to it,” he added. “It’s absolutely and definitely the case that we’ve doomed thousands of kids to brutal, mutilating surgery and premature sterility and we’ve done that on the altar of our hypothetical moral virtue and compassion.”

Kyle, who continuously argued that adults should be able to choose what they do with their bodies, called Peterson out for his “moral panic,” sending the frazzled professor into another impassioned diatribe.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-how-modern-cult-self-help-fuels-cynical-attacks-welfare-state

Contemporary self-help teachings are attractive because they assure us that we are the makers of our own destiny. They preach that we have within us the power to change our lives for the better, even to make ourselves anew. Self-help leaders, from Tony Robbins to spiritual gurus like Robin Sharma and Deepak Chopra, ask us totake responsibility for our lives.

The idea is simple: By taking responsibility for our emotions and what happens to us, we rid ourselves of dependence and thereby potential weakness. By accepting wholeheartedly the value of personal responsibility we become empowered,for no longer do we allow our lives to be dictated by sheer happenstance or the unpredictable whims of others.

Personal responsibility is not merely a core value of much self-help. Harvard political scientist, Yascha Mounk, has recently argued, we are today living in *The Age of Responsibility*. Lauded in presidential speeches as well as bestselling books (like **Jordan Peterson**’s *12 Rules For Life*) the value of personal responsibility has become central to contemporary moral and political discourse.

Obsession with individual responsibility

Yet this has not always been so. Mounk describes the historical shift from a conception of “responsibility-as-duty,” prior to the 1960s, to a conception of “responsibility-as-accountability” that emerged forcefully during the tenures of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. This has since become common sense.

In the wake of the “neoliberal turn,” collective responsibility was exchanged for a myopic obsession with encouraging individuals to become self-sufficient.

This shift in the meaning of responsibility has redirected attention from wider structural transformations to the actions of individuals and, in the process, led to the scaling back of the Welfare State. Thus welfare regimes have been under siege since the eighties.

The “responsibility framework” changed the meaning of the Welfare State: once conceived as a public institution based on multiple values, it is now regarded as a mere instrument designed to reward the responsible and punish the irresponsible.

This perspective casts the popularity of self-help teachings in a new (more sinister) light. Deregulation and large cuts to social services have produced dire socio-economic conditions that demand a high degree of personal responsibility just to get by.

Some scholars argue self-help and spiritual teachings offer individuals a message of personal empowerment and are popular only because they are a useful means of coping with the intense precariousness and social insecurity experienced by many today.

We do not lack agency

One response to the responsibility framework on the part of progressives has been to deny the possibility for personal responsibility. Some egalitarian philosophers and sociologists have countered the rhetoric of responsibility, most commonly invoked by conservatives, with the claim that we are, in fact, wholly byproducts of social circumstance: that we lack any agency at all.

This tactic, although understandable, is deeply misguided. The fact that most people on both the Right and the Left accept that personal responsibility is an important value suggests that this strategy is nothing short of political suicide.

In other words, telling ordinary individuals they lack agency is unlikely to be met with enthusiasm, no matter their ideological leanings. Additionally, personal responsibility is central to so much of modern life: democratic institutions, intimate relationships, the rule of law. All of these presuppose the possibility for responsibility.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what a society that took seriously the idea that we have no agency whatsoever would look like.

A (partial) defense of self-help

Progressives are right in suggesting that too little attention is paid to the role of social structures in determining how people’s lives go. One of the core problems with self-help teachings is that they tend to distract us from the myriad ways that our successes and failures depend on factors beyond our control. We are encouraged to see our lives as self-made, rather than as the byproduct of collective efforts and contingencies.

Still, the popularity of self-help cannot be reduced to the insecurity caused by neoliberalism. For one, self-help can be traced back to the Stoics of antiquity. Although certainly modernized, it nevertheless preaches a similar gospel of self-reliance.

Second, self-help empowers people by giving them a sense of agency, the feeling that what they think and do actually matters. To recognize the value of this we need only consider what happens when one is told the opposite: when people believe they lack agency, they generally act accordingly.

Finally, modern life, given the scope of freedom it affords, requires self-regulation. Ask anyone currently on a diet, raising kids or working on their anger issues whether or not taking responsibility for their emotions and actions is important.

Self-help is both useful (and sometimes necessary), but it needs to be tempered by a sociological understanding of the reality of social life. Self-help teachings can empower, but they can also convince people they are responsible for their own misfortune when in fact they aren’t. In these instances, self-help can become dangerous and destructive.

Self-help does not make for good public policy. It is one thing to take responsibility for our lives, and quite another to punish someone (or let them be punished by the State) because we think they didn’t do the same.

It is an injustice to the Welfare State to view it as a mere instrument for dolling out rewards to the responsible. It is more than that; it is a public institution meant to embody the values of trust, equality, benevolence, justice, freedom and social solidarity.

If we allow self-help philosophy to inform our approach to public policy, it will shrink our moral imaginations. It will leave us less able to see when it is inappropriate to apply the value of personal responsibility, and also less willing.

Galen Watts, PhD Candidate in the Cultural Studies Graduate Program, Queen's University, Ontario

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

===

CleanTechnica

Jordan B. Peterson: Climate Change Denier & Faux Lover Of Science

December 20th, 2018 by Michael Barnard

Jordan Peterson is many things. He’s a best-selling author, although not in France, unsurprisingly. He’s a former Professor at the University of Toronto, now on likely permanent leave. He’s famous for refusing to use the gender pronouns preferred by his students for reasons he claimed were related to freedom of speech. He’s been adopted by the alt-right and incels as one of their preferred intellectuals, over his very faint protests.

And he’s aclimate change denier.

What’s the evidence for that? Well, his own words, as quoted in Wikipedia with full references.

Peterson doubts the scientific consensus on climate change. Peterson has said he is “very skeptical of the models that are used to predict climate change”, He has also said, “You can’t trust the data because too much ideology is involved”.  In a 2018 Cambridge Union address, Peterson said that climate change will not unite anyone, that focusing on climate change is “low-resolution thinking”, and there are other more important issues in the world.

And there’s what he has said onTwitter.

Human emissions of carbon dioxide have saved life on Earth from inevitable starvation & extinction due to C02: https://t.co/y4ZHXtDcLt

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) January 30, 2017

Something for the anticapitalist environmentalists to hate https://t.co/woIk2EhEDw

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 2, 2018

Has Climate Change Activism Run its Course? https://t.co/ooiohqu0kL

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) June 16, 2018

Hurricanes: not worse: https://t.co/eeMRxi4G6y

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) September 14, 2018

These are all climate change denial talking points, and the sources are climate change denial organizations such as the GWPF and Richard Lindzen.

Michael Mann is a famed and awarded climate scientist. He’s an American climatologist and geophysicist and currently director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. What does he say about Peterson’s quoted sources?

“Lindzen long ago discredited himself as a messenger on climate,” Mann told me in an email. “He engages in bad faith tropes rather than legitimate scientific discourse. What makes Lindzen so dangerous as an agent of denial is that he appears to have impressive credentials but his claims about climate change are vacuous and ill-founded. The denial machine relishes the opportunity to launder its denialist rhetoric through the imprimatur of an MIT professor/National Academy member. Lindzen gives them that opportunity.”

Does Peterson respect scientific empiricism at all?

That’s what he often claims, but you’d be hard pressed to find scientists in the fields Peterson talks about outside of his own who would agree with it.

What about his lobster nonsense? Let’s ask an actual neuroscientist, Leonor Gonçalves, Research Associate in Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, UCL, writing in The Conversation in a piece entitled Psychologist Jordan Peterson says lobsters help to explain why human hierarchies exist?—?do they?

It is true that serotonin is present in crustaceans (like the lobster) and that it is highly connected to dominance and aggressive social behaviour. When free moving lobsters are given injections of serotonin they adopt aggressive postures similar to the ones displayed by dominant animals when they approach subordinates. However, the structures serotonin can act on are much more varied in vertebrates with highly complex and stratified brains like reptiles, birds and mammals?—?including humans.

What about Scott Mitchell, who completed BSc in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Waterloo, and then a Master of Science with research in bioinformatics and is now a PhD student in Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, in his Carlton University piece entitled Jordan Peterson Uses Pseudoscience to Support His Intellectually Feeble Ideas?

There are some enormous problems with this reasoning. First, the fact that our nervous systems are actually very different from lobsters (is that really shocking?). Second, Peterson claims that humans and lobsters diverged 350 million years ago, which is just one example of his ignorance of evolutionary biology: although the ancestors of lobsters did appear around 350 million years ago, they’re invertebrates, while humans are vertebrates. These groups on the phylogenetic tree diverged at least half a billion years ago. Why not compare humans to animals that are much closer genetically, like bonobos, where we can see evidence of social cooperation? Or if we don’t really care about the scale of the evolutionary timeline?—?since Peterson clearly doesn’t!?—?hell, why not look at colonies of bacteria that have exhibited forms of cooperation? Or how about looking at the male seahorse as proof of how men are natural caregivers who should abandon our jobs to care for our young? Or hey, look at the preying mantis?—?maybe women should cannibalize their mates!

What about same-sex parenting? He is on record multiple times stating that children need a mother and a father, not a mother and a mother or a father and a father. The Medical Journal of Australia summarized four different systematic reviews and meta-analyses of dozens of studies from different organizations in Australia and the USA from 2010 to 2017. Here are the pull quotes:

“an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on over three decades of peer-reviewed research, that having a gay or lesbian parent does not harm children”

“children raised by same-sex couples fare as well as other children across a number of wellbeing measures, including academic performance, cognitive development, social development, and psychological health”

“being raised by same-sex parents does not harm children, with children in such families doing as well emotionally, socially and educationally as their peers”

“gender or sexuality of parents did not adversely affect child health or wellbeing”

That’s four major literature reviews which say the complete opposite of what Peterson says. What they agree harms children is discrimination, homophobia, and harassment, which is what Peterson is providing and supporting. These are even in his academic ballpark, so he has even less excuse for being non-empirical than usual.

We could go on, but Peterson’s complete lack of adherence to what is empirically valid outside of his area of specialization?—?clinical psychology?—?is well understood by everyone except his supporters.

Why is he spouting off about climate change?

That’s a harder question to answer because the reasons for denial overlap for most people, and almost no one is honest about their motivations for it. And of course I don’t know him personally. That all said, I’ll try to unpackwhy I think he’s a denier.

First off, Peterson consistently interprets things he has skimmed in line with his biases. That’s apparent in his treatment of Taoism, The Enlightenment, Jung, feminism, lobsters and the like. He’s a textbook case of a couple of things:

Confirmation bias?—?He interprets data to match his bias and preconceptions much more often than he changes his mind to fit reality and data. He’s intellectually arrogant outside of his own field. He doesn’t do the work. In the case of global warming and climate change, he’s predisposed to not believe in it, so interprets data to fit.

Dunning-Kruger Effect?—?This is the false sense of self-confidence people without competence feel early in their investigation of complex fields. Even smart, educated people are subject to it. Peterson demonstrates this constantly with facile reads of innumerable fields outside of his area of actual expertise, clinical psychology. What’s interesting is that he’s undoubtedly fully aware of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, yet obviously feels it doesn’t apply to him.

Second, why would Peterson have this bias that he’s confirming about global warming and climate change?

Well, he was born in Alberta, which is climate denial central for Canada. He went on to Queen’s University in Ontario, Harvard, and then UofT, all places of higher learning where sanity prevails, but apparently while you can take the boy out of Alberta, it’s harder to take Alberta out of the boy. This is pure supposition on my part.

Third, he’s made himself famous mostly by attacking progressives and liberals, and they accept climate change so ipso facto…

He certainly doesn’t maintain anywhere near the same level of contempt for the much worse excesses on the right as he does for minor excesses on the left and in academia. His statements about post-Modernism and Marxism on campus have to be read to be believed. Strike that, they have to be read with disbelief, and likely a stunned expression.

Liberals and progressives accept the science of global warming and climate change to a much larger degree than conservatives at this point in history. Some of the proposed arguments even sound like Marxism to scared right-wingers. So Peterson is predisposed to attack global warming and climate change because of who accepts it. It’s dumb as a box of hammers from a guy as smart as Peterson, but he still defends his lobster analogy despite withering corrections, so this is par for the course.

Finally, he’s been captured by his audience on the right.

Peterson originally did something good. He put all of his videos on YouTube. Some of them are even worth watching. Then he decided to die on the sword of being rude to transgenders, although he characterized it as freedom of speech, vastly overstating the entire issue. He’s famously thin-skinned about insults to him personally, however, bringing lawsuit after lawsuit against people who publicly dismiss his ideas. Freedom of speech is for him personally, not others in general, it seems.

This made him beloved of the right, and to be clear, he’s pretty much a social conservative. He’s lightly Christian, he’s a strong believer in hierarchy, he’s a casual and consistent misogynist and he loves to be an authority. His thinking on economic matters is even weaker than on lobsters, so it’s harder to call him a fiscal conservative except for his frequently expressed revulsion over Commies on campus.

But as his former mentor at UofT said, Peterson loves the rhetorical patterns of demagogues. He loves that when they said something and got roars of approval, they repeated it more loudly, and then honed in on the subset of things that got them the biggest roars.

That’s all Peterson is doing. Saying things that his audience loves to hear, reveling in their roars of approval, then repeating himself.

And since his audience is mostly younger, white, conservative men, and that audience has a strong tendency to be climate change deniers and to love trolling liberals, when he says ‘climate change stoopid’, they roar their approval.

Given that he makes a very good income out of this audience, just as Shapiro and Coulter do, this is actually smart, even if venal, ugly, and intellectually dishonest. But Peterson has shown every evidence of venality and intellectual dishonesty while spouting often ugly things?—?enforced monogamy anyone??—?he later pretends were misunderstood for a couple of years. This is just par for the course.

Does Peterson really believe that global warming and climate change are faked, or not an issue, or not understood? Yes, he’s that intellectually arrogant, and is rewarded richly for being so, so he’s sticking with it.

Is he right about climate change? No, even less so than on most of the other topics he spouts off about. But it won’t stop him until his audience stops listening and roaring their approval.

This article originally appeared in The Future is Electric.

==

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/thinkspot-might-be-jordan-petersons-best-grift-yet/

rww 1119

no lnx

‘Thinkspot’ Might Be Jordan Peterson’s Best Grift Yet

By Jared Holt | November 27, 2019 12:27 pm

Psychology-professor-turned-right-wing-commentator Jordan B. Peterson teamed up with “classical liberal” BlazeTV host Dave Rubin and ditched the crowdfunding website Patreon last year after it cracked down on hate speech and wound up banning YouTube personality Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. The duo vowed to create an alternative site and, nearly a year later, have ?launched an early version of their creation “Thinkspot”—?an absolute mess that is ripe for disaster.

Peterson is a right-wing cult phenomenon, having risen to prominence for his vocal mischaracterization of and opposition to Canadian human rights legislation that forbid?s discrimination based on gender identity or expression. He made a media career out of expressing anger at the idea he would have to address students by their preferred pronouns, ?something he denounced as “cultural Marxism.” Rubin has made his living by claiming to be a “liberal” but saying, doing, and believing everything a Republican does?; he currently works for Glenn Beck.

Late last year, the ?pair began soliciting money from their overlapping fan bases to build and develop the website that would come to be known as ?Thinkspot.? After delays, the ?site is now in beta testing. Right Wing Watch obtained an invitation to Thinkspot, and for no reason at all I quickly seized the display name “Timcast”—which coincidently is also the Twitter handle of a beanie-wearing political entertainer on YouTube.

Users who get an invitation to beta-test the site are greeted with a paragraph above the site’s terms of service ?stating that Thinkspot is supposed to be “a place that fosters a free flow of ideas, unbound by censorship or ideology.” It directs users to a lengthy “Free Speech Statement” that promises the site “will advocate for these principles by protecting speech that falls within the protection of the First Amendment and by refusing to give into outside pressures that seek to limit free speech.”

After agreeing to the terms and conditions, users are prompted to select either a “platform” plan or a “contributor + platform plan.” To make posts on the website, you will need to pay—a quid pro post, if you will. Right Wing Watch elected to not spend money on this website. I passed one ?of my 10 available invitations to Gizmodo’s Tom McKay, who?, for some reason, gave the website ?$10 ?and is now seeking a refund.

The ?suggested donation for the simple platform plan is $30 per year?; ?the link for the contributor+ plan redirects to a page where users can opt to give money to specific creators in order to access special content. The creator subscriptions begin at a special? introductory ?price of $30 per year, but if users want the big gun—Peterson’s exclusive content—that will set them back $120, which is allegedly half ?the price ?it will cost them when the unspecified introductory period concludes.

After selecting to proceed with or without a subscription, users are routed to their Thinkspot home page and fed a tutorial for using the website meant to instruct them on engaging in “the discourse.” It shows users how to insert hyperlink citations in their posts and then drops off users at an audio recording of a lecture Peterson gave on his book tour last year. Despite this audio page being a place where all new users presumably wind up, the top “User Q&A” submission reads: “test question @55, please do not answer except for more testing :-).”

The website by default signs up new users to non-paywalled content from Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila Peterson, ?who advocates a certainly unhealthy all-meat diet,? and Heather Mac Donald, who has been on a multi-year crusade against diversity and inclusion efforts at universities, in addition to 18 other contributors. One portion of the website sells users e-books, however those books are only readable on the Thinkspot platform. “Books purchased on Thinkspot will only be functional on this site and are non transferable. Limited pages will be available for annotation without purchase,” ?reads a statement on the ?e-book retail page?.

Peterson’s website, like much of the rest of his career, appears to be little more than smash-and-grab jockeying for ?his fans’ money. What’s more, the site has some design flaws. Twitter user @skeptical7th noted that Thinkspot’s allegedly “robust” password protection can be undermined by simply resetting one’s password.

Seventh

@skeptical7th

Replying to @skeptical7th

Thinkspots FAQ calls their password protection “robust and immune to breaches." Which is hilarious given that it's absolutely not. They ask for a password with a capital letter, number & special symbol etc but don't worry if you later reset the password "password" works fine.

Thinkspot also bans the use of memes and emojis. “In accordance with Thinkspot’s commitment to quality discourse and long-form discussion, we do not allow users to upload profile pictures and do not allow the use of emojis or memes,” the site’s FAQ states.

As Gizmodo’s McKay wrote:

The internet has no shortage of ill-fated platforms and bizarre grifts, ranging from useless fact-authentication site Verrit to Japanese crane game sites that idiots lose money on. Thinkspot may claim to have bigger ambitions, but it looks a hell of a lot like it’s nothing more than the defunct Jeremy Renner fan app with a thesaurus and a guy who thinks Frozen is sinister feminist propaganda at the helm.

Tags: Jordan B. Peterson social media

==

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson

Jordan Bernt Peterson (born June 12, 1962) is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology,[1] with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief[2] and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.[3]

Peterson has bachelor's degrees in political science and psychology from the University of Alberta and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at McGill from 1991 to 1993 before moving to Harvard University, where he was an assistant and then an associate professor in the psychology department.[4][5] In 1998, he moved back to Canada as a faculty member in the psychology department at the University of Toronto, where, as of 2019, he is a full professor.

Peterson's first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999), examined several academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation of emotion, creation of meaning, and several other topics such as motivation for genocide.[6][7][8] His second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was released in January 2018.[4][9][10]

In 2016 Peterson released a series of YouTube videos criticizing political correctness and the Canadian government's Bill C-16, "An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code". The Act added "gender identity and expression" as a prohibited ground of discrimination,[a][11] which Peterson characterised as an introduction of compelled speech into law,[12][13][14] although legal experts have disagreed.[15] He subsequently received significant media coverage, attracting both support and criticism.[4][9][10] Peterson is associated with the "Intellectual Dark Web".[16][17][18]

Early life

Peterson was born on June 12, 1962,[19] and grew up in Fairview, Alberta, a small town northwest of his birthplace Edmonton, in Canada.[20] He was the eldest of three children born to Beverley, a librarian at the Fairview campus of Grande Prairie Regional College, and Walter Peterson, a schoolteacher.[21][22] His middle name is Bernt (/:{ˈbɛərənt:(style="border-bottom:1px dotted"):}:/ *BAIR-ənt*),[23] after his Norwegian great-grandfather.[24]

When he was 13, he was introduced to the writings of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Ayn Randby his school librarian Sandy Notley—mother of Rachel Notley, leader of the Alberta New Democratic Party and 17th Premier of Alberta.[25] He also worked for the New Democratic Party (NDP) throughout his teenage years, but grew disenchanted with the party. He saw his experience of disillusionment resonating with Orwell's diagnosis, in The Road to Wigan Pier, of "the intellectual, tweed-wearing middle-class socialist" who "didn't like the poor; they just hated the rich".[21][26] He left the NDP at age 18.[27]

Education

After graduating from Fairview High School in 1979, Peterson entered the Grande Prairie Regional College to study political science and English literature.[2] He later transferred to the University of Alberta, where he completed his B.A. in political science in 1982.[27] Afterwards, he took a year off to visit Europe. There he began studying psychological origins of the Cold War, 20th-century European totalitarianism,[2][28] and the works of Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,[21] and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[28] He then returned to the University of Alberta and received a B.A. in psychology in 1984.[29] In 1985, he moved to Montreal to attend McGill University. He earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology under the supervision of Robert O. Pihl in 1991, and remained as a post-doctoral fellow at McGill's Douglas Hospital until June 1993, working with Pihl and Maurice Dongier.[2][30]

Career

From July 1993 to June 1998,[1] Peterson lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, while teaching and conducting research at Harvard University as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department. During his time at Harvard, he studied aggression arising from drug and alcohol abuse and supervised a number of unconventional thesis proposals.[27] Two former Ph.D. students, Shelley Carson, a psychologist and teacher from Harvard, and author Gregg Hurwitz recalled that Peterson's lectures were already highly admired by the students.[4] In July 1998, he returned to Canada and took up a post as a full professor at the University of Toronto.[1][29]

Peterson's areas of study and research are in the fields of psychopharmacology, abnormal, neuro, clinical, personality, social, industrial and organizational,[1] religious, ideological,[2] political, and creativity psychology.[3] Peterson has authored or co-authored more than a hundred academic papers[31] and has been cited almost 8,000 times as of mid-2017. [32]

For most of his career, Peterson had an active clinical practice, seeing about 20 people a week. He had been active on social media, and in September 2016 he released a series of videos in which he criticized Bill C-16.[25][33] In 2017, he decided to put the clinical practice on hold,[9] as well as, in 2018, temporarily stopping teaching because of new projects.[22][34]

In June 2018, Peterson debated with Sam Harris at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver while moderated by Bret Weinstein, and again in July at the 3Arena in Dublin and The O2 Arena in London while moderated by Douglas Murray, over the topic of religion and God.[35][36] In April 2019, Peterson debated professor Slavoj Žižek at the Sony Centre in Toronto, Canada over happiness under capitalism versus Marxism.[37][38]

Works

Books

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999)

Main article: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

In 1999 Routledge published Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. The book, which took Peterson 13 years to complete, describes a comprehensive theory about how people construct meaning, beliefs and make narratives using ideas from various fields including mythology, religion, literature, philosophy and psychology in accordance to the modern scientific understanding of how the brain functions.[27][5][39]

According to Peterson, his main goal was to examine why both individuals and groups participate in social conflict, explore the reasoning and motivation individuals take to support their belief systems (i.e. ideological identification[27]) that eventually results in killing and pathological atrocities like the Gulag, the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Rwandan genocide.[27][5][39] He considers that an "analysis of the world's religious ideas might allow us to describe our essential morality and eventually develop a universal system of morality".[39] Jungian archetypes play an important role in the book.[4]

In 2004, a 13-part TV series based on Peterson's book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief aired on TVOntario.[21][29][40]

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018)

Main article: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

In January 2018, Penguin Random House published Peterson's second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. The work contains abstract ethical principles about life, in a more accessible style than Maps of Meaning.[9][4][10] To promote the book, Peterson went on a world tour.[41][42][43] As part of the tour, Peterson was interviewed in the UK by Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News which generated considerable attention, as well as popularity for the book.[44][45][46][47] The book topped bestselling lists in Canada, US and the United Kingdom.[48][49] As of January 2019, Peterson is working on a sequel to 12 Rules for Life.[50]

YouTube channel and podcasts

In 2013, Peterson began recording his lectures ("Personality and Its Transformations", "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief"[51]) and uploading them to YouTube. His YouTube channel has gathered more than 1.8 million subscribers and his videos have received more than 65 million views as of August 2018.[33][52] In January 2017, he hired a production team to film his psychology lectures at the University of Toronto. He used funds received on the crowdfunding website Patreon after he became embroiled in the Bill C-16 controversy in September 2016. His funding through Patreon has increased from $1,000 per month in August 2016 to $14,000 by January 2017, more than $50,000 by July 2017, and over $80,000 by May 2018.[25][33][53][54] In December 2018, Peterson decided to delete his Patreon account after Patreon's controversial bans of political personalities.[55]

Peterson has appeared on many podcasts, conversational series, as well other online shows.[52][56] In December 2016, Peterson started his own podcast, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, which has included academic guests such as Camille Paglia, Martin Daly, and James W. Pennebaker.[57] On his YouTube channel he has interviewed Stephen Hicks, Richard J. Haier, and Jonathan Haidt among others.[57] In March 2019, the podcast joined the Westwood One network with Peterson's daughter as a co-host on some episodes.[58] Peterson supported engineer James Damore in his action against Google.[10]

Biblical lectures

In May 2017, Peterson began The psychological significance of the Biblical stories,[59] a series of live theatre lectures, also published as podcasts, in which he analyzes archetypal narratives in Book of Genesis as patterns of behavior ostensibly vital for personal, social and cultural stability.[10][60]

In March 2019, Peterson had his invitation of a visiting fellowship at Cambridge University rescinded. He had previously said that the fellowship would give him "the opportunity to talk to religious experts of all types for a couple of months", and that the new lectures would have been on Book of Exodus.[61] A spokesperson for the University said that there was "no place" for anyone who could not uphold the "inclusive environment" of the university.[62] After a week, the vice-chancellor Stephen Toope explained that it was due to a photograph with a man wearing an Islamophobe shirt.[63] The Cambridge student union released a statement of relief, considering the invitation "a political act to ... legitimise figures such as Peterson" and that his work and views are not "representative of the student body".[64] Peterson called the decision a "deeply unfortunate ... error of judgement" and expressed regret that the Divinity Faculty had submitted to an "ill-informed, ignorant and ideologically-addled mob".[65][66]

Self Authoring Suite

In 2005, Peterson and his colleagues set up a for-profit company to provide and produce a writing therapy program with a series of online writing exercises.[67] Titled the Self Authoring Suite,[21] it includes the Past Authoring Program (a guided autobiography); two Present Authoring Programs which allow the participant to analyze their personality faults and virtues in terms of the Big Five personality model; and the Future Authoring Program which guides participants through the process of planning their desired futures. The latter program was used with McGill University undergraduates on academic probation to improve their grades, as well as since 2011 at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University.[68][69] The programs were developed partially from research by James W. Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin and Gary Latham at the Rotman School of Management of the University of Toronto.[4] Peterson's co-authored 2015 study showed significant reduction in ethnic and gender-group differences in performance, especially among ethnic minority male students.[69][70] According to Peterson, more than 10,000 students have used the program as of January 2017, with drop-out rates decreasing by 25% and GPAs rising by 20%.[21]

Political views

Peterson has characterized himself as a "classic British liberal",[28][71][72] and as a "traditionalist".[73] He has stated that he is commonly mistaken to be right wing.[52] The New York Times described Peterson as "conservative-leaning",[74] while The Washington Post described him as "conservative".[75]

Academia and political correctness

Peterson's critiques of political correctness range over issues such as postmodernism, postmodern feminism, white privilege, cultural appropriation, and environmentalism.[56][76]

Writing in the National Post, Chris Selley said Peterson's opponents had "underestimated the fury being inspired by modern preoccupations like white privilege and cultural appropriation, and by the marginalization, shouting down or outright cancellation of other viewpoints in polite society's institutions",[77] while in The Spectator, Tim Lott stated Peterson became "an outspoken critic of mainstream academia".[28] Peterson's social media presence has magnified the impact of these views; Simona Chiose of The Globe and Mail noted: "few University of Toronto professors in the humanities and social sciences have enjoyed the global name recognition Prof. Peterson has won".[33]

According to his study—conducted with one of his students, Christine Brophy—of the relationship between political belief and personality, political correctness exists in two types: "PC-egalitarianism" and "PC-authoritarianism", which is a manifestation of "offense sensitivity".[78] He places classical liberals in the first type, and places so-called social justice warriors, who he says "weaponize compassion", in the second.[21][2] The study also found an overlap between PC-authoritarians and right-wing authoritarians.[78]

Peterson considers that the universities should be held as among the most responsible for the wave of political correctness which appeared in North America and Europe.[33] According to Peterson, he watched the rise of political correctness on campuses since the early 1990s,[79] and considers that the humanities have become corrupt, less reliant on science, and instead of "intelligent conversation, we are having an ideological conversation". From his own experience as a university professor, he states that the students who are coming to his classes are uneducated and unaware about the mass exterminations and crimes by Stalinism and Maoism, which were not given the same attention as fascism and Nazism. He also says that "instead of being ennobled or inculcated into the proper culture, the last vestiges of structure are stripped from [the students] by post-modernism and neo-Marxism, which defines everything in terms of relativism and power".[28][80][81]

Postmodernism and identity politics

And so since the 1970s, under the guise of postmodernism, we've seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities, it's come to dominate all of the humanities – which are dead as far as I can tell – and a huge proportion of the social sciences ... We've been publicly funding extremely radical, postmodern leftist thinkers who are hellbent on demolishing the fundamental substructure of Western civilization. And that's no paranoid delusion. That's their self-admitted goal ... Jacques Derrida ... most trenchantly formulated the anti-Western philosophy that is being pursued so assiduously by the radical left.

— Peterson, 2017[80]

Peterson says that postmodern philosophers and sociologists since the 1960s[76] have built upon and extended certain core tenets of Marxism and communism while simultaneously appearing to disavow both ideologies. He says that it is difficult to understand contemporary Western society without considering the influence of a strain of postmodernist thought that migrated from France to the United States through the English department at Yale University. He states that certain academics in the humanities

... started to play a sleight of hand, and instead of pitting the proletariat, the working class, against the bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against the oppressor. That opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name ... The people who hold this doctrine—this radical, postmodern, communitarian doctrine that makes racial identity or sexual identity or gender identity or some kind of group identity paramount—they've got control over most low-to-mid level bureaucratic structures, and many governments as well.[80]

Peterson's perspective on the influence of postmodernism on North American humanities departments has been compared to Cultural Marxist conspiracy theories.[46][82][83][84]

Peterson says that "disciplines like women's studies should be defunded" and advises freshman students to avoid subjects like sociology, anthropology, English literature, ethnic studies and racial studies, as well as other fields of study he believes are corrupted by the Neo-Marxist ideology.[85][86][87] He says that these fields, under the pretense of academic inquiry, propagate unscientific methods, fraudulent peer-review processes for academic journals, publications that garner zero citations,[88] cult-like behaviour,[86] safe-spaces,[85] and radical left-wing political activism for students.[76] Peterson has proposed launching a website which uses artificial intelligence to identify and showcase the amount of ideologization in specific courses. He announced in November 2017 that he had temporarily postponed the project as "it might add excessively to current polarization".[89][90]

Peterson has criticized the use of the term "white privilege", stating that "being called out on their white privilege, identified with a particular racial group and then made to suffer the consequences of the existence of that racial group and its hypothetical crimes, and that sort of thing has to come to a stop. ... [It's] racist in its extreme".[76] In regard to identity politics, while the "left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let's say, and the right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride" he considers them "equally dangerous" and that instead should be emphasized individualism and individual responsibility.[91] He has also been prominent in the debate about cultural appropriation, stating it promotes self-censorship in society and journalism.[92]

Bill C-16

Main article: An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code

On September 27, 2016, Peterson released the first installment of a three-part lecture video series, entitled "Professor against political correctness: Part I: Fear and the Law".[25][12] In the video, he stated he would not use the preferred gender pronouns of students and faculty, saying it fell under compelled speech, and announced his objection to the Canadian government's Bill C-16, which proposed to add "gender identity or expression" as a prohibited ground of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and to similarly expand the definitions of promoting genocide and publicly inciting hatred in the Criminal Code.[12][93]

Peterson speaking at a Free Speech Rally in October of 2016

He stated that his objection to the bill was based on potential free speech implications if the Criminal Code is amended, as he claimed he could then be prosecuted under provincial human rights laws if he refuses to call a transgender student or faculty member by the individual's preferred pronoun.[13] Furthermore, he argued that the new amendments, paired with section 46.3 of the Ontario Human Rights Code, would make it possible for employers and organizations to be subject to punishment under the code if any employee or associate says anything that can be construed "directly or indirectly" as offensive, "whether intentionally or unintentionally".[14] Other academics and lawyers challenged Peterson's interpretation of C-16.[13]

The series of videos drew criticism from transgender activists, faculty and labour unions, and critics accused Peterson of "helping to foster a climate for hate to thrive" and of "fundamentally mischaracterising" the law.[94][25] Protests erupted on campus, some including violence, and the controversy attracted international media attention.[95][96][97] When asked in September 2016 if he would comply with the request of a student to use a preferred pronoun, Peterson said "it would depend on how they asked me [...] If I could detect that there was a chip on their shoulder, or that they were [asking me] with political motives, then I would probably say no [...] If I could have a conversation like the one we're having now, I could probably meet them on an equal level".[97] Two months later, the National Post published an op-ed by Peterson in which he elaborated on his opposition to the bill and explained why he publicly made a stand against it:

I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words "zhe" and "zher." These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.

I have been studying authoritarianism on the right and the left for 35 years. I wrote a book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, on the topic, which explores how ideologies hijack language and belief. As a result of my studies, I have come to believe that Marxism is a murderous ideology. I believe its practitioners in modern universities should be ashamed of themselves for continuing to promote such vicious, untenable and anti-human ideas, and for indoctrinating their students with these beliefs. I am therefore not going to mouth Marxist words. That would make me a puppet of the radical left, and that is not going to happen. Period.[98]

In response to the controversy, academic administrators at the University of Toronto sent Peterson two letters of warning, one noting that free speech had to be made in accordance with human rights legislation and the other adding that his refusal to use the preferred personal pronouns of students and faculty upon request could constitute discrimination. Peterson speculated that these warning letters were leading up to formal disciplinary action against him, but in December the university assured him that he would retain his professorship, and in January 2017 he returned to teach his psychology class at the University of Toronto.[99][25]

In February 2017, Maxime Bernier, candidate for leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, stated that he shifted his position on Bill C-16, from support to opposition, after meeting with Peterson and discussing it.[100] Peterson's analysis of the bill was also frequently cited by senators who were opposed to its passage.[101] In April 2017, Peterson was denied a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant for the first time in his career, which he interpreted as retaliation for his statements regarding Bill C-16.[32] A media relations adviser for SSHRC said "[c]ommittees assess only the information contained in the application".[102] In response, The Rebel Media launched an Indiegogo campaign on Peterson's behalf.[103] The campaign raised C$195,000 by its end on May 6, equivalent to over two years of research funding.[104] In May 2017, Peterson spoke against Bill C-16 at a Canadian Senate committee on legal and constitutional affairs hearing. He was one of 24 witnesses who were invited to speak about the bill.[101]

In November 2017, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University first year communications course was censured by her professors for showing a segment of The Agenda, which featured Peterson debating Bill C-16 with another professor, during a classroom discussion about pronouns.[105][106][107] The reasons given for the censure included the clip creating a "toxic climate", being compared to a "speech by Hitler",[26] and being itself in violation of Bill C-16.[108] The censure was later withdrawn and both the professors and the university formally apologized.[109][110][111] The events were criticized by Peterson, as well as several newspaper editorial boards[112][113][114] and national newspaper columnists[115][116][117][118] as an example of the suppression of free speech on university campuses. In June 2018, Peterson filed a $1.5-million lawsuit against Wilfrid Laurier University, arguing that three staff members of the university had maliciously defamed him by making negative comments about him behind closed doors.[119] Wilfried Laurier asked that the lawsuit be dismissed, saying that it was ironic for a purported advocate of free speech to attempt to curtail free speech.[120]

Gender relations and masculinity

Peterson has argued that there is an ongoing "crisis of masculinity" and "backlash against masculinity" where the "masculine spirit is under assault".[20][121][122][123] He has argued that feminism and policies such as no-fault divorce have had adverse effects on gender relations and destabilized society.[121] He has argued that the existing societal hierarchy that the "left" has characterised as an "oppressive patriarchy" might "be predicated on competence."[20] Peterson has said that men without partners are likely to become violent, and has noted that "enforced monogamy", i.e. societies wherein monogamy is a social norm, decrease male violence.[20][121] He has attributed the rise of Donald Trump and far-right European politicians to what he says is a push to "feminize" men, saying "If men are pushed too hard to feminize they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology."[124] He attracted considerable attention over a 2018 Channel 4 interview where he clashed with interviewer Cathy Newman on the topic of the gender pay gap.[125][126] Peterson disputed that the gender pay gap was solely due to sexual discrimination.[126][127][128] Writing for The New York Times, Nellie Bowles said that most of Peterson's ideas "stem from a gnawing anxiety around gender".[20]

Climate change

Peterson doubts the scientific consensus on climate change.[129] Peterson has said he is "very skeptical of the models that are used to predict climate change".[130] He has also said, "You can't trust the data because too much ideology is involved".[131]

Personal life

Peterson married Tammy Roberts in 1989.[25] They have one daughter and one son.[21][25]

He is a philosophical pragmatist.[60] In a 2017 interview, Peterson was asked "are you a Christian?" and responded "I suppose the most straight-forward answer to that is yes".[132] In 2018, Peterson emphasized that his conceptualization of Christianity is probably not what is generally understood, stating that the ethical responsibility of a Christian is to imitate Christ, for him meaning "something like you need to take responsibility for the evil in the world as if you were responsible for it ... to understand that you determine the direction of the world, whether it's toward heaven or hell".[133] When asked if he believes in God, Peterson responded: "I think the proper response to that is No, but I'm afraid He might exist".[9] Writing for The Spectator, Tim Lott said Peterson draws inspiration from Jung's philosophy of religion, and holds views similar to the Christian existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich. Lott also said Peterson has respect for Taoism, as it views nature as a struggle between order and chaos, and posits that life would be meaningless without this duality.[28]

Starting around 2000, Peterson began collecting Soviet-era paintings,[26] displayed in his house as a reminder of, he argues, the relationship between totalitarian propaganda and art, and as examples of how idealistic visions can become totalitarian oppression and horror.[4][34] In 2016, Peterson became an honorary member of the extended family of Charles Joseph, a Kwakwaka'wakw artist, and was given the name Alestalagie ("Great Seeker").[26][134] In late 2016, Peterson went on a strict diet consisting only of meat and some vegetables to control severe depression and an auto-immune disorder, including psoriasis and uveitis.[22][135] He stopped eating any vegetables in mid-2018.[136]

Peterson wrote the foreword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Gulag Archipelago, released in November 2018.[137]

Bibliography

Books

Notable journal articles

Notes

===

aoen 419

Mill rightly thought that the typical case wasn’t one of views that are false, but views that have a mixture of true and false. It would be far more effective to try to engage with the truth in views we despise than to try to ban them for their alleged falsity. The Canadian psychologist and YouTube sensation Jordan Peterson, for example, says things that are false, misogynistic and illiberal, but one possible reason for his following is that he recognises and speaks to a deficit of meaning and values in many young men’s lives. Here, the right approach is to pry apart the true and compelling from the false and toxic, through reasoned consideration. This way, following Mill’s path, presents a better chance of winning over those who are lost to views we despise. It also helps us improve our own understanding, as Mill wisely suggests.

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Would gun legislation help stop school shootings? Jordan Peterson thinks it would do "zero" – and here's why:

"I think that in the United States the probability that gun legislation would stop the school shootings is basically zero. School-shooting culture doesn't seem to have manifested itself in other places as much as it has in the U.S. And I can't tell exactly why that is. It's conceivable that it has something to do with the more rough and ready attitude towards guns."

Peterson says gun control is useless at best and dangerous at worst, given that it reduces our own opportunity for "dangerousness."

The right to bear arms, he says, is an integral part of a free society. If only the police and army are "allowed to be dangerous," there's going to be problems.

Big Think's Derek Beres holds Peterson's argument up to the light, and counters it. Can personal responsibility really solve this problem?

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random find, not viewed

Jordan Peterson: IQ, Race & The "Jewish Question"

800K

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m91vhePuzdo

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https://www.alternet.org/heres-what-luddites-were-right-about

Here's what the Luddites were right about

If we continue on our current path environmental Armageddon isn’t just possible but likely, where neoliberal economic policy threatens to render all of us unnecessary, and where unfettered technology isn’t used as a liberatory tool but rather as a system of surveillance and propaganda.

Sometime in 1779, in the midst of that era of trans-Atlantic revolutions that marked the Age of Reason, an apocryphal weaver named Ned Ludd supposedly took a hammer to two stocking frames in a textile factory near Leicester, smashing to bits that simple machinery which threatened his livelihood with the promise of expedient and profitable mechanization. Ludd wasn’t real, yet the popularity of the character demonstrated something about the inequities that defined the lives of English workers, and the threat that technology posed to them.

Though Ludd wasn’t an actual person, the movement that took its name from him very much was. Some three decades after his imagined act of iconoclastic fury, the Luddites threatened the interests of capital in both English town and country, destroying the machines of the Industrial Revolution which were designed to replace them.

During the Luddite Crisis of 1811-1816, a popular song was heard in the countryside: “Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, /His feat I but little admire. /I will sing the achievements of General Ludd, /Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire.”

That the term “Luddite” is so completely preserved as a designation of opprobrium speaks to the ultimate victory of their opponents. For contemporary readers, a Luddite is a technophobe who spurns innovation, an archaic throwback who can’t admit to industrial progress, an eccentric who avoids the thrill of the digital in favor of the comforts of the analog. Such connotations do a disservice to a radical movement with a coherent economic perspective, and that more importantly critiqued the ways in which nascent capitalism threatened the question of human meaning. Such connotations for the term are convenient for a power structure that takes the principles of the Industrial Revolution to their nihilistic conclusions.

By contrast, Marxist historian E.P. Thompson in his classic 1963 The Making of the English Working Class wrote that he in part wished to “rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ handloom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan… from the enormous condescension of posterity.” If such a task was desirable when Thompson published his study, than it’s existentially critical in our current era. Today, the Luddite critique of technology in service of capital is necessary to tackle the political crisis of meaning that has been engendered by neo-liberalism.

We currently face a crisis of meaning brought on by technology that would make poor Ned Ludd’s threatening stocking frames seem rustically charming by comparison. We’ve all become intimately aware of how at the individual level a type of epistemological anarchism has taken hold as social media has called basic facts into question for massive swaths of the population, and on the global level it’s become clear how industrialization threatens us with complete ecological collapse in the form of climate change. What’s not remarked on enough is the threat posed to workers by mechanization, the exact same threat that the weavers of the Luddite Rebellion fought against.

Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur and a dark horse presidential candidate for the 2020 Democratic primary, has made the centerpiece of his campaign a condemnation of the threat that modern technology poses to the American worker. Kevin Roose in an article for the New York Times explains that Yang’s long-shot candidacy is being waged more to highlight an issue that has been almost entirely overlooked, writing that the candidate believes “automation and advanced artificial intelligence will soon make millions of jobs obsolete – yours, mine, those of our accountants and radiologists and grocery store cashiers.” Yang says that “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society…. [W]e’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college.” He opines that just that one development “will be enough to createriots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.” 

Yang’s longshot candidacy arguably exists more to promote his theories than it does as a legitimate campaign for the White House, and yet the theories he’s promoting deserve attention. The former tech executive’s potential solution includes auniversal basic income, a so-called “Freedom Dividend,” which would ensure all Americans a regular source of money from the government. An unconventional solution to many no doubt, and yet Yang is convincing that such measures should be considered as technology increasingly makes entire categories of workers superfluous.

While the Freedom Dividend is a start in thinking about a crisis which is only a decade away, it doesn’t address an even deeper issue. Universal basic income may meet collective material needs that an increasingly efficient but anti-worker capitalism won’t, yet the crisis of meaning will only be exacerbated in a nation where we’re all taught that self-worth is defined through work; work that for many of us will no longer be needed. When meaning dissipates, the ideologies that will be victorious will be those that offer some new value to our lives, and unless the left offers a cognoscente solution to what’s an existential crisis, they will be crushed by dark impulses that offer ersatz meaning at the ballot box and increasingly in the street.

Partisans on the right would rather convince workers that the threat is a caravan of destitute women and children slowly walking toward America’s southern border to seek asylum as refugees, but immigrants haven’t been taking jobs – robots have. That the wealthy donors to the current administration have a vested interest in demonizing immigrants and minorities to obscure the manner in which they are exploiting the working class of all races is easy enough to understand. Much of our current politics of fear and hate is bolstered by an increasing absence of meaning. I speak not of church; this is not a bromide about the decline of traditional religion, for meaning can just as easily be found outside of a pew as in it (and increasingly the former is the case).

Rather it’s to observe that as humans are fundamentally meaning-making creatures, it’s imperative that the left have a coherent vision that speaks to value beyond economic necessity. Yang’s proposal is serious, but to truly tackle the question of how individuals draw meaning from society we’ll need to consider radical possibilities that transcend the assumption that capitalism is the normal and eternal state of things, and that traditional work is the only means of self-definition.

The political crisis of meaning constitutes the very medium in which we exist, paradoxically making it difficult to always perceive. Our alienation is so complete that we’ve been inured against realizing just how much a sense of meaninglessness permeates American lives. We see it in the fever-swamp hell-scape that is the relativist rage of social media, where empathy is increasingly eliminated in favor of a frequently nonsensical and irrational snarl. We see it in the opioid epidemic (still disturbingly overlooked by many media outlets), where rates of addiction have increased 300 percent since 1999, calling to mind Carl Jung’s observation that addiction is a material solution to a spiritual problem. And we especially see it in the horrifying growth of neo-fascism, especially as represented by the man who occupies the White House. Garret Keizer, in a recent and brilliant article in the New Republic, provides a crucial diagnosis of that which Donald Trump is merely a symptom, explaining that “American nihilism is an oozing sore, but like an oozing sore it is evidence both of a malady and of a body’s desperate attempt to heal itself.”

Currently the right offers a “solution” of meaning to the very problems that they created;theirs is a faux-meaning that glitters like fool’s gold, and their empty moralism is pure nihilism. What the popularity of a Trump evidences is in part a thirst for meaning, except it’s a dark meaning that defines itself through the domination of others. The sick genius of “Make America Great Again” was that it bolstered those who felt they lacked meaning in a way that “America is Already Great” spectacularly and tone-deafly couldn’t.

We see right-wing ersatz meaning everywhere, from the empty pronouncements of self-help guru Jordan Peterson, whose very popularity speaks to the need to find meaning in a world that is offering little of it, but who instead serves his audience a nonsensical mishmash of rhetoric about lobster serotonin and transphobia, to the explicitly fascistic politics of “Identitarians” who trumpet white supremacy as an ethos through which the disaffected can define themselves. Something pathetic in that ideology, as it offers the empty calories of fake meaning defined entirely through the individual members valorizing themselves because they superficially look like somebody whom they think did something important long ago. A meaning based in blood lines and phenotype is no meaning at all, it’s worshiping an imagined family tree as a god. The “meaning” offered by such groups is cheap; it’s nothing more than the meaning of a snarl, punch, slap, and kick. Such formalized bigotry is idiotic, but those myths also organize people, and we must be wary of them.

I speak not as Senator Bernie Sanders, who recently evidenced far too much sympathy for those voters who because of their own personal racism couldn’t bring themselves to vote for black candidates. A politics of meaning need not necessarily exist to attract back those who are disaffected and drawn to pernicious ideologies. If a coherent left politics of meaning does ultimately attract such people, then good. But what I speak of is a need of providing for ourselves a coherent vision that speaks to the soul as well as to the body, which addresses Rose Schneiderman’s socialist anthem that sings of how we must have bread, but roses too.

In One-Dimensional Man the philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote that the “judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living … underlies all intellectual effort.” An answer to that question has to be the focus of left politics. The optimism of the Obama campaign spoke to a sense of meaning through American civil religion, pluralism, and greatness through diversity, but his administration’s failure to address growing economic disparity was a botched opportunity at speaking to material condition necessary to let spiritual conditions thrive. It would overstate the case to claim that this alone is the origin of our current malaise (it isn’t), but future left politics must offer the “hopey, changey stuff” in conjunction with actual changes to the economic order.

Room for hope in the election of so-many first-time candidates to the House of Representatives who are beginning to offer radical policy suggestions from voices that are too often marginalized. Representatives elected in the midterm elections like Ayanna Presley from Massachusetts, Sharice Davids from Kansas, Debra Haaland from New Mexico, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York are all signs that the Democratic Party – which like it or not remains the only effective means of enacting a progressive agenda nationally – can draw strength from its left flank. All four women, and others elected for the first-time, offer not only just the possibility of checking Trumpism, but of enacting their own positive politics of meaning.

But what must be fully considered in the long run is that we face a future where if we continue on our current path environmental Armageddon isn’t just possible but likely, where neoliberal economic policy threatens to render all of us unnecessary, and where unfettered technology isn’t used as a liberatory tool but rather as a system of surveillance and propaganda. As all that is solid melts into air; what is required is a new language of meaning. On a wall in Paris during the student protests of 1968 some radical spray-painted “Be realistic, demand the impossible.” A half century later that advice still holds. Now we have work to do.

Ed Simon is the editor-at-large for The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. A frequent contributor at several sites, his collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post Religion will be released by Zero Books in November 2018. Follow him on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

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no linx vid]

https://bigthink.com/21st-century-spirituality/jordan-petersons-5-most-controversial-ideas-explained

I used to know this guy who liked to talk about Egypt. Five minutes in you’d think, “This dude’s dropping knowledge.” Ten minutes later you’d be searching for the threads. At the hour mark, realizing you haven’t said one word during his screed about freemasons, pyramids, and the Bush administration, you’d desperately seek any possible exit.

Knowledge is worthless without practical application; it becomes, in the words of Alan Watts, a display of “spiritual one-upmanship.” Not that Jordan Peterson doesn’t offer great practical advice. Flipping through my copy of 12 Rules For Life, I’ve found a number of profound sentences. The problem is the path getting there. The threads are often frayed.

Then there's the question of temperament. Watching Peterson react to criticism reminds me of aspiring yogis posting long spiritual quotes underneath pictures of themselves posturing. If you challenge a single word they crumble in disbelief. Their fortress of words locks them in rather than opening them up. Amid their garbled messaging about freedom from ego they’ve actually wrapped themselves so tightly in it they can’t breathe—which is, of course, the basis of yoga.

This was displayed by Peterson when the writer Pankaj Mishra criticized the Canadian professor. Peterson replied by calling Mishra “arrogant” and “racist,” and, after a few moments of Zen reflection, said he’d happily slap him. In his book, Peterson writes, “Have some humility. Have some courage.” He later warns not to “over-estimate your self-knowledge.” Yet he seems to excuse himself from this simple wisdom.

Below are five of Peterson’s more controversial ideas. Some of his sentiments are strong. Sometimes, however, the path to arrival makes you wonder where he was trying to get to in the first place.

White privilege doesn’t exist

There was plenty of deserved blowback when Forbes dubbed Kylie Jenner “self-made.” The environment you’re raised in has a profound effect on both your psychology and opportunities in life. I’m not quite sure how this is even a debatable issue, but in Peterson’s world, it is. White privilege, according to him, doesn’t exist.

After listing numerous categories—health, wealth, age, economic status, and so on—he calls race and ethnicity “post-modernist.” He criticizes one woman's views on white privilege, discussing how her paper was not peer-reviewed or subjected to critical scrutiny. His own scrutiny transforms “white privilege” into “majority privilege.” In China, the Chinese are the dominant race; the culture is built to suit them. And so in America, or Canada, since whites happen to be the majority, the culture is designed to suit them. Whoever the culture is built for is by default privileged; otherwise, the construction would not have been worth it in the first place.

Fair enough. Our gods always look like us. But for someone so insistent about context, it’s baffling that he overlooked the fact that this experiment of democracy is rooted in the idea of a level playing field. Sure, it’s mostly lip service, but still aspirational. Peterson claims that Marxists and post-Modernists (who, according to him, strive to attain the ideals of Marxism)  oppress us, yet Peterson’s inability to consider empathy is the true driver of regression. He’s right that we white men don’t have to apologize for every sin of our ancestors. Yet to think those sins did not rig the game on the soil we occupy is absurd, semantics aside. True, factor analysis is important. Looking outside of your window might prove a little more relevant in this regard, however.

The Left and identity politics

Peterson uses William Buckley and, more recently, Ben Shapiro as examples of conservative thinkers who have defined clear political boundaries: racial superiority is not an option. The fringe Right does not represent conservative values (though that line is rather blurred in America right now). The problem, Peterson continues, is that the Left doesn’t know its boundaries. There is no box stating, “you’ve gone too far.”

Peterson is correct: liberalism is destroying itself. One fitting example is the “Abolish ICE” movement now being towed by 2020 presidential hopefuls. What’s happening on the US-Mexican border is frightening and tragic, at least to those of us who care about human rights. But the agency is responsible for much more than these incidents. The knee-jerk reaction of destroying an agency due to one horrific incident is foolish.

Another example is the backlash Matt Damon received last year when he said, “There’s a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation.” The actor even qualified it by stating that both should be confronted. His original sentiment is so obvious that debating it seems ludicrous—exactly Peterson’s point. The willful unconcern for coherence is dangerous, yet many liberals don’t seem to be taking it seriously.

On the existence of God

Sam Harris has pointed out that the word “atheism” doesn’t appear in his debut book, The End of Faith. That didn’t stop the public from labeling him such. Anyone so vociferously attacking the Bible must not believe in God. But as Peterson points out, such a binary choice is unfair—you either believe in God or not—because the terms are rarely defined. “Belief” and “God” are such generic terms attempting to derive meaning is nearly impossible. That said, Peterson’s explanation of Christ’s spirit living on, for example, is one of the best arguments for a realistic faith I’ve come across. Like David Brooks in The Road to Character, Peterson strips away metaphysics to uncover something valuable in religious literature, without turning to blind faith.

Gay parents raising children

Peterson begins this by declaring the “devil is in the details,” then cites the fact that kids in a family with a father do better than single-parent families. (Speaking of details, interesting that he doesn’t state “families with a mother.”) “I believe quite firmly,” he continues, “that the nuclear family is the smallest, viable human unit—father, mother, child.” If you fragment it below that, you end up paying, he continues. He cites Warren Farrell and Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience. He discusses rough-and-tumble play (based on Panksepp’s incredible work on rats and the PLAY system.) Fathers and children push each other’s limits to “find out where they are.” If juvenile male rats don’t tussle you can treat it with Ritalin and…wait, was the question?

Three-and-a-half minutes into this four-and-a-half minute video he finally gets to the “gay family,” for the first time recalling that yes, women are parents too. Treating gay families in a post-modernist fashion is gerrymandering questions without facing moral responsibilities and—look, here’s the continual problem with Peterson. Many children come from broken homes. Often it’s the father; sometimes it’s the mother. We have to consider that maybe it’s simply hard to research long-term data on gay families because it’s only been about two decades since homosexuals were broadly accepted.

There are plenty of politicians that would gladly overturn gay marriage and homosexual couples adopting children. Peterson misses the most basic, primary, and humane element of this entire conversation: two people in love can do incredible things, including raising children, regardless of gender. Without that love, everything crumbles. The absurdity of the question is only surpassed by the inanity of the response.

#Metoo

“Why are women coming forward now, about events that happened 15 or 20 years ago?” is the question Peterson is asked. Peterson replies:

"There’s been an adolescent insistence since the early sixties that sexual behavior can be rule-free. Now a lot of that was generated as a consequence of the birth control pill, because that was a biological revolution. All of a sudden women can control their reproductive function, in principle...What does that make women? Because now they’re a new biological entity. And so, it’s wide open. What are women now? We don’t know."

He continues along this line, for another minute, finally asking where one draws the line between sexual invitation and harassment. If that question needs to be asked, I’m not sure why he’s even pontificating on the topic. Just because you don’t know what a woman is doesn’t mean they don’t. But that might be too much for this fragile ego to handle.

===

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rights-favorite-new-intellectual-has-some-truly-pitiable-ideas-about-masculinity

More than a decade ago, when he reviewed Harvard curmudgeon Harvey Mansfield’s book, *Manliness*, Walter Kirn asked: "In just which far-off galaxy has Mansfield set up his telescope to scrutinize the doings of us earthlings?”

Mansfield’s book, whose port-and-pipesmoke fantasy of masculinity was itself at least four decades out of date, was hopelessly wrong for an era defined by Truck Nutz and George W. Bush declaring "Mission Accomplished" to an audience of hooting cable news hosts. Challenged in an interview with the *New York Times'* Deborah Solomon to name a manly physical pursuit, Mansfield cited opening jars and moving furniture for his wife. How often did he really move furniture, Solomon pressed. “Not every night,” he replied, “but routinely.”

Mansfield was by no means the first fusty old professor to grouse about female troubles—men like him have been grumbling since before women’s studies made a beachhead at San Diego State in the early '70s.But Manliness was written for a popular audience, and it was one of the earliest salvos in a cottage industry dedicated to saving young males from the ravishments of a culture that had either abandoned genders or created too many, depending on whom you ask. The decade or so since has seen the emergence of a self-proclaimed counterrevolution to the conjoined scourges of gay rights, feminism and preferred pronouns. It includes elbow-patched academics, self-proclaimed men’s rights activists, and the vitamin scammers of the so-called alt-right.

It includes Jordan Peterson.

I thought of Kirn’s question when I took a tentative dip into Peterson’s**12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos**. The first rule is “stand up straight with your shoulders back,” which Peterson’s voluminous videography suggests he obeys only intermittently. The chapter on this first rule begins in a J. Alfred Prufrock mood by comparing humans to lobsters—the manifest complexity of our societies and power politics reduced to the scuttling instincts of arthropods.

Devotees of the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology are fond of this particular maneuver: locate some behavior in the more ancient branches of the tree of life and project it forward across eons to explain little Johnny pulling little Susie’s pigtails, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Holocaust, or whatever. In any case, I like to imagine the diaphanous, energy-based extraterrestrials in their invisible starships, so unutterably alien that they gaze upon man and lobster and can’t tell them apart.

A professor of no particular scholarly distinction—his previous book was a mashup of Gladwellian pop-neuroscience and Joseph Campbell’s pop-anthropology—Peterson rose to fame by getting angry about pronouns, and he now gives lectures on manly self-sufficiency to roomfuls of barely post-adolescent boys still smarting from the Sadie Hawkins dance. (Because what is more manly than prissy grammatical prescriptivism?) Imagine if Richard Spencer were ghoulishly spliced with Suze Orman, and you'll get the idea. Or you could watch one of the dozens of lectures he's posted to YouTube for his frustrated young acolytes.

Peterson’s shtick—as with most vaguely right-wing intellectual output—is to wander the winding garden path before arriving, quite miraculously, at the very point from which he set out. Your prejudices, it appears, are quite correct, and always have been. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Stand up straight, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, I cannot tell a lie. The vanguard of the counterrevolution is finally mired in the muck of mere platitude. Groucho Marx said it best: “Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.”

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Jordan Peterson

Right-wing YouTube star and Canadian professor Jordan Peterson advances a philosophy that demonizes and demeans women, refuses to respect the needs of transgender women, and shares videos that have been described as a gateway into the “alt-right” for men suffering from depression.

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